Mississippi Couple Welcome Rare Quintuplets With 4 Identical Girls

Mississippi couple Shawn and Haylee Ladner have welcomed a rare set of quintuplets.

Haylee gave birth to five babies on February 16 via c-section at the Wiser Hospital for Women and Infants, the University of Mississippi Medical Center (UMMC) shared in a press release. The babies were born at 28 weeks and include four identical daughters—named Adalyn Elizabeth, Everleigh Rose, Malley Kate and Magnolia Mae—and one son, Jake Easton.

The couple struggled with infertility and experienced a miscarriage prior to conceiving their quintuplets through intrauterine insemination. One of the fertilized eggs divided four ways, resulting in identical quadruplet girls, while the other was their son.

“Haylee’s pregnancy was quite rare,” says Dr. Rachael Morris, who provided Haylee’s prenatal care and delivered the babies. “She had a quintuplet pregnancy with four identical females. Reports of spontaneous quintuplets vary but are about 1 in 60 million. There are very few reports of identical quadruplets in the literature to date. Reported incidence is 1 in 10 to 15 million pregnancies. There is only one other report of this combination in the literature from 2018.”

While all five babies have been admitted to the NICU at Children’s of Mississippi, they’re doing very well, the UMMC notes. Haylee has gotten to hold three of them so far and says that they’re thriving. “We’re looking forward to the day when they can come home,” she says. “They are the greatest blessing of my entire life.”

Haylee is also recovering well. She was admitted to UMMC on January 11 and had already spent five weeks in the hospital under the watchful eye of her doctors when she started to go into preterm labor. “Several multidisciplinary meetings had been held prior to her admission and during her hospitalization to plan and arrange every detail of her delivery,” Morris explains. Haylee’s care team included approximately 30 neonatal specialists, and they had a daily schedule set for her stay. “There were five warmers and two rooms ready for the babies, and several neonatologists, neonatal nurse practitioners, fellows, nurses and respiratory therapists ready every day,” Morris says. “We were ready for weeks for this birth.”

Congratulations to the proud new parents!

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