Kendall MacDonald, from New Zealand, gave birth to the first set of twins the country had seen in 20 years. Kendall MacDonald was already a mother to three-year-old Brooklyn, but she and her husband, Josh, yearned for a child to give him a sibling.
She revealed that during her challenging pregnancy, she was asked to decide which two of her four babies she wanted to save. She eventually gave birth to a set of quadruplets.
Mrs MacDonald’s much-hoped for pregnancy with the quads came after three years of trying to conceive.
The couple had desperately wanted a sibling for their boy and had started trying two months after Brooklyn was born.
“Infertility is one thing I am happy to leave in the past. As a teenager, I was told I would find it hard to have children. I had PCOS, endometriosis and I barely ovulated. When I was told this, it wasn’t nice to hear, but I was young and not at that stage in my life where I wanted to have children yet, so it didn’t really affect me.”
Over the period the couple were trying to conceive, there would also be a miscarriage.
Eventually, Mrs MacDonald would seek help to get pregnant using a drug known as 𝐶𝑙𝑜𝑚𝑖𝑓𝑒𝑛𝑒.
‘𝐶𝑙𝑜𝑚𝑖𝑓𝑒𝑛𝑒 helps the body to ovulate and that was my problem. It seemed obvious that we would try that first,’ she explained.
The initial round of treatment for Mrs. MacDonald revealed that she hadn’t ovulated. However, she became pregnant after the dose was raised in her second month.
‘It usually doesn’t happen that fast for people but obviously, that upped dosage created a lot of eggs,’ she said.
The day of her nine-week scan would reveal the presence of another child, but an early check would only confirm the heartbeat of one child. The heartbeats of two more people were then discovered during a third scan that day.
‘We’d gone from one baby, two two, then three then four. It was a huge shock,’ she said.
‘It was very surreal and we couldn’t understand how these babies just kept multiplying.
‘And we were almost in disbelief because multiples of anything don’t run in either of our families. I never expected it.’
Although this was a celebratory moment for the young couple, at 12 weeks the expectant mum was told she may need to make a heartbreaking choice.
‘It was suggested for the sake of my health and my babies health that I reduce my pregnancy by one set of twins,’ she said.
The family were given two weeks to make their decision and during this time they decided to seek out the opinion of two other specialists.
That day the couple went home with the advice if Mrs MacDonald could make it to 28 weeks without going into labour, the quads would be in with a fighting chance.
This would mean the couple would need to spend the next three months hoping their babies continued to grow and that nothing went wrong.
At 28 weeks, she’d went into labour, which went for three days although oddly came with no pain.
Once doctors confirmed she was in labour, Mrs MacDonald was taken straight to theatre where she had a Cesarean section to deliver her babies.
Molly, Quinn, Indie and Hudson – New Zealand’s first set of quads in at least two decades, were born on August 15 at 28 weeks and four days, ranging in weight from 1.1 to 1.3kg.
6At 12 weeks, with all her children at finally at home, Mrs MacDonald said she finally ‘felt like a mum of five’.
‘All this time, I’d been so terrified of losing my precious babies I hadn’t allowed myself to get excited.’
The quads are made up of identical twin girls who shared the same placenta, and fraternal twins – a boy and girl. Mrs MacDonald reports her family are all happy and healthy.
