Quadruplets were born on Saturday at the Rambam Medical Center in Haifa to a couple living in northern Israel. The newborns, three girls and one boy, were all born prematurely in the 27th week of gestation. The average length of human gestation is 280 days, or 40 weeks, from the first day of the mother’s last menstrual cycle. The newborns weigh between 1.21 and 2 pounds.
The mother, 30, had undergone fertility treatments and had a cesarean birth after one of the fetus’s condition had become stressful. All four babies are kept at the neonatal intensive-care unit (NICU) where they are on respirators. Three are in stable condition, one of the girls is on a respirator but is not yet stable.
Prof. Shraga Balzer, director of the NICU, explained that in pregnancies resulting from natural conceptions the chance for quadruplets is 1 in 720,000.
The birth Saturday resulted in several NICU teams being rushed to the unit to cope with the unusual emergency of a large number of premature babies requiring attention at once.
