THE British woman who is pregnant with eight foetuses said yesterday they were alive and kicking, and it was now too late to terminate some of them to give the others a better chance of survival.
Ms Mandy Allwood (32), who has sold her story to the News of the World, told the newspaper: "Every kick makes me smile because it's a reminder that they're still alive."
The gynaecologist treating 14-weeks pregnant Ms Allwood, Dr Kypros Nicolaides of Kings College Hospital, London, had said her best chance of having healthy babies would be a "reduction operation to terminate six of them, leaving two to grow in her womb."
But Ms Allwood told the newspaper: "A lot of people don't know what the reduction procedure involves, but I'm too late now to have it."
"The foetuses are too big to dissolve in my body, which means they will have to come out of me and that could take the healthy ones with them."
Ms Allwood conceived the babies by having sex with her boyfriend, Mr Paul Hudson, too soon after a course of fertility drugs, although she told the News of the World she took the drugs for only two days.
The case of Ms Allwood, who already has a five-year-old son, has provoked furious controversy in Britain both over the role of such drugs and over the involvement of the press and media in publicising such cases.
Newspapers who are rivals to the News of the World have accused Ms Allwood and Mr Hudson of trying to make a fortune out of the pregnancy, pointing out that they have retained an adviser, Mr Max Clifford, who specialises in marketing news stories.
But Mr Hudson called these newspapers "hypocrites". "Nearly all of them offered cash for exclusive rights, claiming they supported us," he said.
. The British public wants tighter controls on who is eligible for fertility treatment, according to a survey published yesterday.
Nearly three-quarters of those asked - 74 per cent - said fertility treatment should only be available to married couples or those in a "stable relationship", according to the NOP poll for the Sunday Times.
The poll of 1,592 people showed just 19 per cent said fertility treatment should be available to any woman who wants to have children, while 7 per cent were unsure.