Overview
- The mother, Jenitar Na'amoana, gave birth by caesarean at Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital on Tuesday, July 14 to four girls named Emily, Harriet, Alexa and Catherine.
- Doctors confirmed the babies came from a single fertilised egg that split into four embryos and all shared one placenta while each had their own amniotic sac, a combination that made the pregnancy very high risk.
- All four girls were born at 28 weeks and four days and had birth weights of about 1,025g, 1,121g, 1,120g and 1,151g; they remain in the hospital neonatal intensive care unit and are reported to be doing extremely well.
- The birth doubled the Na'amoana family from six to ten people, the mother is recovering at home with her four older children, and the parents have launched a GoFundMe to pay for a larger vehicle, equipment and ongoing expenses.
- Clinicians say spontaneously conceived identical quadruplets who share a single placenta are vanishingly rare—often cited as roughly one in 15 million—and the team views the short-term outlook as cautiously optimistic while the babies grow to term in hospital care.