SEPTUPLETS: IT'S A MIRACLE

• Share

Dr. Katherine Hauser will never forget her first sight of Bobbi McCaughey's babies on the screen of the ultrasound machine. Hauser, a reproductive endocrinologist in Des Moines, Iowa, had been treating Bobbi for infertility, and the medication she'd prescribed had worked like a charm. Although it often takes repeated injections of ovulation-stimulating Metrodin to prime a woman's reluctant eggs for successful conception, Bobbi got pregnant on the first try. Hauser had warned Bobbi and her husband Kenny that a side effect of fertility drugs can be multiple births; in about 20% of cases, a woman who conceives on Metrodin has twins or triplets or, in rare cases, quads or quints.

But not even Hauser was prepared for what was happening in Bobbi's abdomen. There on the sonogram, taken six weeks into the pregnancy, were not two or three fetuses, not five or six, but seven budding human forms, each in its own tiny sac of amniotic fluid. Even now, half a year later, she can't fully describe how she felt. "The words shock and disbelief come to mind," she says. "For a good length of time, I couldn't wrap my mind around this."

Hauser's sense of wonder was tempered with serious concern. Multiple pregnancies frequently end in miscarriage or stillbirth, and the risk multiplies with the number of fetuses. While septuplets have been delivered a handful of times, in no case have they all lived more than a few days or weeks. So Hauser, along with the McCaugheys' perinatologists, Drs. Paula Mahone and Karen Drake, patiently explained to the McCaugheys the standard option in such a situation: they could, if they chose, undergo "selective reduction"--a medical euphemism for the aborting of several fetuses so the others would stand a better chance of being born healthy.

For many couples, deciding whether to sacrifice some of their children to save the others would pose an agonizing moral dilemma. For Bobbi, 29, and Kenny, 27, it was a no-brainer. As deeply religious Baptists, they are utterly opposed to abortion. "That just wasn't an option," Kenny told reporters last week. "We were trusting in the Lord for the outcome." By conventional medical standards, the McCaugheys were taking a huge gamble; by their own, they were simply living their faith.

And as just about everyone on the planet now knows, their faith was rewarded. Not only did the septuplets emerge from Bobbi's womb intact last Wednesday, but they were healthier than anyone had dared hope. "I didn't think we'd have this kind of outcome," admitted an exhausted, exultant Mahone the day after she and Drake delivered the babies by caesarean section. "It just strikes me as a miracle." Kenny McCaughey's first public utterance, issued at a press conference at Missionary Baptist Church in Carlisle after a visit with his four new sons and three new daughters, was a simple but eloquent "Wow!"

The world clearly agreed. Within minutes after the birth, the Iowa Methodist Medical Center and Blank Memorial Hospital for Children in Des Moines and the McCaugheys' tiny nearby hometown of Carlisle had become the focus of intense international attention. President Clinton phoned to congratulate the new mother. "You know," he said, "when those kids all go off to school...you will be the best-organized manager in the U.S." (Her reply: "That, or I will be in a straitjacket somewhere.")