Pamela Clark and her husband Stephan are experiencing their own baby boom. They're expecting quadruplets to be born sometime in the next few weeks.
Not far away in the LDS Hospital neonatal intensive care unit, three of the four quadruplets born six weeks ago are gaining strength for the day when they're big enough to go home with their mom and dad to Idaho Falls. The fourth is at Primary Children's Medical Center.
And a few miles to the south, in Provo, Mirna Tabarez and her husband Salvador Ruiz spend all the minutes they can find with their quartet, in the newborn intensive care unit at Utah Valley Regional Medical Center.
While still rare, as birth rates go, the number of quadruplet births has increased more than 300 percent in the past 15 to 20 years, according to Dr. T. Flint Porter, director of maternal fetal medicine at LDS Hospital, who said he's seen five sets of them in the last three years or so.
Of those, about half end up being born extremely prematurely, with possible complications and even death. The other half make it beyond 28 weeks, the magical point when complication rates seem to drop significantly with quadruplet births. Those born before 24 weeks seldom survive, he said.
And that's why Clark's been confined to bed rest in LDS Hospital for the past eight days. She's hoping to stave off delivery until Jan. 23, which would be the 28-week point in her pregnancy.
It's a familiar routine for any mother who has successfully delivered quads. Tabarez had six months of bed rest and a burgeoning stomach before delivering sons Gerardo and Salvador Jr. and daughters Leslie and Milagros two months early.
Lemmon was in the hospital for several months to delay delivering the babies —girls Britt, Jayce and Blayke and boy Cade — even sooner. At that, they came 14 weeks early.
The Clarks live on the east rim of Zion National Park. Because they're so isolated from the intensive medical care such a pregnancy might require, she came to Salt Lake City in mid-October and stayed with her sister for six weeks, until she started labor while walking through a mall. At the hospital, the physician was able to halt the labor, but she's been there ever since, working on scrapbooks and reading and doing her very best to keep those babies from coming too early, she said.
All three moms got their quadruplets the expected way: fertility treatments.
"The two big culprits are ovulation induction agents and in-vitro fertilization, where you put in more than two" fertilized eggs, Porter said.
In these cases, three eggs were implanted and one of them split into two, meaning half of the quads are also identical twins. Britt and Jayce Lemmon are identical, for instance.
Preterm birth is the biggest complication of a quadruplet pregnancy, Porter said. A singleton generally delivers at 40 weeks, twins at 38, triplets at 33 or 34. Only half of quadruplets make it to 28.
Quadruplets born earlier can survive, but about one-fourth have long-term conditions like brain or lung damage, Porter said.
"Miracle" is a word that both Tabarez, 35, and Clark, 41, use when speaking of their babies. In Clark's case, she and her husband learned early in the pregnancy that there were four babies, but one had apparently died. Two weeks later, they found instead that "Baby D" did have a heartbeat. The staff was amazed, but Stephan Clark had been praying and felt strongly that the baby was alive, Pamela said.
That baby's name is Dillon William, Clark said. The other babies are Stephan James, Abigail Rose and Carter Neeleman (her maiden name). Mom and dad have already hired a full-time nanny and expect to receive some help from their church family when the babies are big enough to go home.
Quadruplets are typically kept in intensive care until they can breast-feed all their meals, have gained some weight and their body temperatures have stabilized. Tabarez's babies should reach that milestone just in time for Christmas.
More details about the Lemmon quadruplets were not available at press time, as mom was making a quick trip home to Idaho Falls and couldn't be reached.
E-mail: lois@desnews.com; lwarner@desnews.com