WASHINGTON, 15 July — The mother of the world’s newest septuplets saw and touched her newborn children for the first time on Friday, doctors at Washigton’s Georgetown University Hospital said. “She was clearly thrilled. She touched the babies and spent some time with them,” said hospital spokeswoman Karen Alcorn.
Saudi Ambassador to Washington Prince Bandar ibn Sultan yesterday congratulated Fahd Al-Qahtani, the proud father of the seven children. He said the Saudi Embassy in Washington had been providing every help and care to the family.
Prince Bandar said the mother and children — five boys and two girls — were in stable condition. Although the babies are listed in critical state, they are expected to survive, doctors said. A team of 25 medical professionals helped deliver the tiny but healthy babies by Caesarian section Thursday night.
The seven children, all between 2 and 2.5 pounds and measuring 13 inches in length, were delivered between 11:25 and 11:28 p.m. with the help of five doctors, three anesthesiologists and dozens of nurses and other support staff at the hospital. The infants are in the hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit, or NICU.
All but one of the infants are on support ventilators, but Dr. Siva Subramanian told a news conference yesterday they were breathing on their own and the ventilator settings were slowly coming down. “While the mother is doing great, I don’t think we can say we’re out of the woods yet,” said Subramanian.
Dr. Craig Winkel, chief of obstetrics and gynecology at Georgetwon, said all the babies scored between seven and nine on the 10-point Apgar scale — a means of measuring the health of newborns minutes after birth. Seven to 10 is considered normal.
The mother was seven months pregnant when she gave birth. She was admitted to the hospital in mid-June after her community physician, Dr. Mutahar Fauzia, referred her to the hospital.
Fauzia, who became emotional during a press conference on Friday, said she was thankful to the team of Georgetown physicians. “I have been very lucky that the ending is going to be, God willing, good,” she said. “We have had several dry runs to make sure everybody was available,” Subramanian said.
The father, who was present in the delivery room, was concerned about the health of his wife, said Dr. Helaine Landy. “He didn’t want to go to NICU before knowing his wife was OK,” Landy said. But after the babies were born, he broke out in a broad smile, another physician said. The babies are expected to stay in the hospital for seven to nine weeks. “Most multiple births of this magnitude don’t make it to survival,” said Eric Widra of Shady Grove Fertility Center, a Washington-area clinic.
Doctors marveled on Thursday that they had encountered no serious complications, but they warned that the infants face many uncertainties. Because they are premature, the babies’ internal organs such as lungs and intestines have not developed enough to do their jobs without help. But doctors said babies appear not to have suffered any birth defects, and all internal organs and body parts seem to have developed normally.
Many of the facts surrounding the rare obstetrical event were kept confidential on Thursday at the family’s insistence. Doctors at a triumphant morning news conference repeatedly declined to answer questions that might enable the public to identify the family. The Muslim couple forbade the hospital to publicly identify them.
“All I know is that they want to be anonymous, and we have to honor that request,” said Nail Al-Jubeir, a spokesman for the Saudi Embassy in Washington. “These are issues that deal with in our personal life,” he said. “In our culture, you don’t start asking questions about these things. If they don’t want to tell the world who they are, it’s not up to us to do that.”
When the couple decided to seek medical help, they were referred to Mutahar Fauzia, an Arlington-based obstetrician-gynecologist who specializes in infertility treatment. Fauzia, 49, said she made two unsuccessful attempts to induce production of extra eggs by the mother before succeeding in late December. About seven weeks later, in February, Fauzia said, she was stunned by her success: seven tiny fetuses. “I said, ‘God, please help me.’ I meant it,” she said. “From that day until I took them to Georgetown, I lost sleep at night worrying about this.”
Fauzia said she explained to the parents that if complications arose during pregnancy, it might be necessary to surgically remove one or more of the fetuses for the safety of others or to save the mother. But the couple said their Muslim beliefs forbade that.
