Scientific Facts about Quadruplets?

The possibility of a mother giving birth to more than one child at a time is a very slim possibility, and is subject to chance alone. There is one case of twins in every 88 births, of triplets in every 88×88 cases, and of quadruplets in every 88×88×88 — that is, at the rate of once in every 681,472 births. Statistics have shown one case of quintuplets in every 41,600,000 births. The remarkable thing is that medicine has recorded fifty births of this kind. And there are mothers who have given birth to sextuplets; it is said that a woman in Chile, who lived three hundred years ago, gave birth to seven girls at one time, but not one of them lived.

The greater the number of babies the mother carries, the greater the possibility of her giving birth before the appointed time — that is, before their bodily formation is complete. And even when it is complete, they are born smaller in size than the normal newborn, since it is impossible for a mother to carry four children each weighing seven pounds, the weight of a normal baby; hence each of the four infants comes to weigh three or four pounds, if fortune is kind.

Here the tangible troubles of the quadruplets begin. The first of these troubles is the problem of feeding them. Being so weak, they cannot nurse or suck; instead they are fed by means of a glass tube fitted with a dropper, and if they cannot swallow food in this way, a rubber tube is used with them, passed into the stomach to deliver the food at once.

Then there is the problem of keeping them at a constant temperature, for they must breathe air that is humid to a certain degree and contains oxygen. That is why we see pictures of newborns like these placed in a container resembling a special metal box, its inner sides lined with soft woolen coverings and fitted with a tight glass lid to keep out drafts of air. The infant breathes oxygen that has passed through hot-water pipes before entering the container. As for the temperature, it is kept moderate by heating the container with special electrical apparatus under constant supervision.

This box is opened only at the infant's feeding time. Their milk is breast milk diluted with water. When they grow a little, the mother can feed them milk from the bottle, since it is impossible for her to nurse four infants at one time — and if she did so, she would not leave herself a single minute for doing anything else.

When the quadruplets reach the age of a few weeks, they have as good a chance to grow as any ordinary child, and at that stage they weigh close to ten pounds.

The troubles of the mother of quadruplets do not come only after their birth, for carrying quadruplets is far harder on her, and calls for special and intensive care. And though the delivery of each of the small-sized infants may seem easy, the process of delivering them takes a long time, because the womb, which has been contracting, lacks the strength and the capacity for rapid work.

Yet God creates for every problem a solution and for every distress a relief. In cases of multiple births, financial assistance is given to these mothers. And what makes the matter easier for them is that the birth of quadruplets does not usually come except after the birth of an earlier child; so the mother has grown used to the business and has had experience of it.

The possibility of quadruplet births occurs most often in families whose numbers have previously increased greatly at a single stroke; if the mother and the father are descended from two families in which twins were frequent, it is natural that their offspring should be of this kind.

But quadruplets are rare. So do not trouble yourself, expectant mother, or fear that you will present your husband with four children at once. In that case the signs of unusual swelling would appear on you, and you would have to be examined under X-rays — and that is enough to confirm the number of children on the way.

Quadruplet births become frequent in a nation when it reaches the utmost degree of its maturity, and that happens after a war, not before it. For Nature does not prepare human beings to be turned out in batches!!