Medicine: Fertility Drugs: A Mixed Blessing

"They just kept coming. We weren 't expecting anything like this."

Mark Levy, 27, of Fairfield, Ohio, had good reason to be surprised and excited last month. His wife Pamela, 28 and previously childless, had just given birth to quintuplets—a phenomenon that until recently happened only once in every 41 million births. But quintuple deliveries and other multiple births have become more commonplace lately; Pamela, like thousands of other women, had been taking a fertility drug called Pergonal. Doctors estimate that women who become pregnant after treatment with Pergonal are many times more likely,...