By Dave Andrusko
http://twitter.com/daveha
Meryl and Addy
I’d meant to get to this Monday but the story of a mom who gave birth to a live set of quintuplets—against the advice to “reduce” the number of her babies—is an ever-green story.
The basis of the story that ran on the Los Angeles CBS affiliate was Meryl and John Ferraro’s delightful family blog: socalquints.com. There we learn that the family had brought home Gabrielle, Riley (a boy), Addison (a girl), Cooper, and Emerson (a girl)–whom they have collectively nicknamed GRACE—after a rapid-fire delivery at “Banner Desert Medical Center in Mesa, Arizona on Sept. 26 under the care of perinatologist and multiple birth specialist Dr. John Elliott.”
Based on information from the family blog, CBS reported that the Ferraros “decided to follow Dr. Elliott back to Arizona after being advised by several doctors in Southern California to seriously consider fetal reduction, the practice of killing one fetus in a multiple-baby pregnancy.”
“After reading all the information, we were horrified,” the Ferraro’s background page reads. “We decided it was not our place to choose which of our babies would live and which one would die. If God was giving us 5 babies, there was a reason. We made a decision to see them as a precious blessing from God above and not as burdens we needed to eliminate.”
With the assistance of a team of 15 nurses, nine doctors and a nurse practitioner and five respiratory therapists, all five babies were out in less than three minutes, according to Mr. Ferraro. “The babies were born following a pregnancy of 32 weeks and five days, Ferraro said. The national average gestation for quintuplets is 28 to 29 weeks.”
I snuck a peek this morning at socalquints.com and found an October 3 post. There you learn that “The babies are all doing well on their 1 week birthday. Mom is getting some sleep (finally got to leave the hospital last night) and recovering.”
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