Random Thoughts
Multiple births – Part 2
May 26, 2017
As we saw last week, multiple births are uncommon. When they occur, the vast majority result in twins. Triplets are more rare than twins, quadruplets are more rare than triplets, etc.
The expanded use of fertility drugs beginning in the late 20th century increased greatly the instances of multiple births and the number of children conceived at one time.
An Iowa couple, Kenny and Bobbi McCaughy, had seven babies (four boys and three girls) at once in 1997. All are still alive.
Then in 1998, a Texas couple named Iyke Udobi and Nkem Chukwu became the parents of octuplets – six girls and two boys. One girl died a week after being born; the remaining seven celebrated their eighteenth birthdays last December.
In 2009, a California woman named Nadya Suleman gave birth to octuplets (six boys and two girls). All survived, putting Suleman into the Guiness Book of World Records. This multiple birth, however, proved to be quite controversial.
Instead of taking fertility drugs to increase the number of eggs a woman produces, Suleman and her doctor used a process known as in vitro fertilization.
This procedure involves taking an egg from a woman’s body, fertilizing it in a lab, and then implanting it into the woman’s womb. The birth of the Suleman babies became, of course, a newsworthy event. But this time, the media attention was mostly negative.
Suleman was unmarried, unemployed, and did not have the financial means to support a family. Moreover, she already had six children. Why did she need eight more? The California Medical Board revoked her doctor’s license.
This particular multiple birth caused controversy because it was not so much a “blessed event” as it was an exercise in manufacturing babies just because the technology to do so exists.
I decided to write about this topic to tell you about two interesting multiple births that happened in the early 1950s – before fertility drugs were widely used. I’ll do that next week.
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