WASHINGTON, 14 July — A set of septuplets — five boys and two girls — were born to a woman at Georgetown University Hospital Thursday night. The mother, identified as Saudi by a source, was doing well.
The seven babies, the first born in the United States since the McCaughey septuplets were born three years ago in Iowa, were delivered 12 weeks prematurely by Caesarian section between 11:25 and 11:28 p.m. Thursday. A team of 25 medical professionals attended the birth while more than 25 additional doctors and nurses waited for the babies in the neonatal intensive care unit. The delivery, for which the hospital staff had practiced, went as smoothly as the near-simultaneous birth of seven children can. “None of the problems for which we were prepared occurred,” Dr. Craig Winkel, chief of obstetrics and gynecology at Georgetown, said during a morning press conferenc.
The babies, who are expected to be in the hospital between seven and nine weeks, all weigh about two pounds and are between 13 and 14 inches long. Their tiny hands are just big enough to wrap around an adult’s finger, doctors said.
The seven children have been named, doctors said, but the names are not being released. According to doctors, here is the birth order and birth weights. 1,000 grams equals 2.2 pounds.
The children’s APGAR scores, an assessment of a newborn’s general health, were between 7 and 9, hospital officials said. Ten is a perfect score.
Six of the seven children are on ventilators to help them breathe and one needed medication to help raise his blood pressure.
“We’re lucky. While the mom is doing great; I’m not sure we can say we’re out of the woods yet as far as the babies are concerned,” Winkel said..
Doctors said that the parents never considered a process known as “selective reduction” in which some of fetuses in a multiple pregnancy are aborted for the health of the mother or the surviving fetuses.
“The patient being a Muslim did not believe in taking the lives of the babies,” said Dr. Mutahar Fauzia, the mother’s gynecologist who oversaw the drug treatments that resulted in the pregnancy.
Fauzia, who practices in Arlington, said that she knew there were seven fetuses about seven weeks into the pregnancy.
“I said, ‘God, please help me.’ I meant it. From that day until I took them to Georgetown, I lost sleep at night worrying about this.”
She said when she told the parents they were going to have seven babies, their reaction was “Hope and fear together. They understood.”
The mother, who has been on bedrest at home since 18 weeks into her pregnancy, has been at Georgetown since mid-June. She was allowed to go to the bathroom and take a shower while seated but otherwise was restricted to her bed, hospital officials said.
The babies’ father was present for the delivery. Dr. Siva Subramanian, chief of neonatology, said that “after the babies were born, you could see a broad smile (on his face).”
Doctors say the mother is doing well and has begun to pump breast milk to feed her babies once they are able to take food by mouth. They are currently being fed intravenously.
The mother had not yet seen her babies, who are in the hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit, but she had seen pictures of them, the unit’s manager of nurses said at a news conference. “She looked at each (photo) and clutched them to her breast,” said nurse manager Dana Adamson. “You could tell she was crying. She looked at each individually, very carefully.”
“She is a very serene individual”, said Lynette Philip, a nurse who helped with the delivery. “I think her mind set helped in terms of taking this pregnancy as far as she could.”
The mother will probably go home within a few days. The woman’s personal physician, Dr. Mutahar Fauzia, said the babies were conceived using ovulation induction, where drugs stimulate the production of more than one egg.
Asked whether the mother had considered ending some of the pregnancies to increase the chances of survival of the other babies, Fauzia said she had rejected this.
The mother came to the hospital about three weeks ago. Labor began spontaneously on Thursday evening. “She had been given medication to quell some of the contractions, but we had expected something to happen any day,” said Dr. Helain Landy, who delivered the babies.
The last set of septuplets born in the United States were the McCaughey septuplets, born Nov. 19, 1997, in Iowa.
