Woman gives birth to rare identical quadruplet daughters
A woman in Australia has given birth to a rare set of identical quadruplet daughters after a pregnancy her doctor described as "unheard of."
Jenitar Sau Na'amoana, 34, gave birth to her quadruplets via cesarean section on July 14 at Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital in Queensland, according to the hospital.
Na'amoana and her husband Jortham did not use fertility treatments. All four babies are identical quadruplets, meaning they shared a single placenta, the hospital said.
Dr. Alexa Bendall, the fetal medicine specialist and obstetrician who cared for Na'amoana, said the pregnancy is the first of its kind for the hospital.
"We have never seen a spontaneously conceived pregnancy of this type with quads, and [Na'amoana] has somehow dodged every complication and risk for both herself and her babies to be here today, with four gorgeous newborn girls," Bendall said in a video shared by the hospital Tuesday. "Monozygotic [or identical] quadruplets are estimated at 1 in every 15 million pregnancies, but to share the same placenta, this is unheard of."
Na'amoana was admitted to the hospital at 25 weeks pregnant and delivered her daughters three weeks later, 28 weeks into her pregnancy.
The babies are now being cared for in the hospital's neonatal intensive care unit and are doing "extremely well," according to Bendall.
To put the rarity of the quadruplets' birth into perspective, there were only 144 quadruplet and higher order births in the United States in 2024, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Na'amoana and her husband were already the parents of four children ages 1 to 10, so the quadruplets' birth instantly doubled their number of children.
The parents named their daughters Emily, Harriet, Alexa, and Catherine, with Alexa being named after Bendall, the doctor who delivered her and her sisters.
