VENTURA : Mayor, Wife Succeed in Fertility Program

Nancy Francis and her husband, Richard, mayor of Ventura, knew exactly what they wanted for Christmas--they’ve been asking for the same gift for 10 years.

Francis gave birth Sunday to a set of healthy twins, Hannah and Dillon, after 19 years of marriage, 10 years of trying fertility treatments and two years of in an experimental fertilization program.

“This is amazing; the holidays are going to be super,” a laughing Richard Francis said Tuesday from his wife’s hospital bed at Community Memorial Hospital of San Buenaventura. Mother and babies will be home Thursday.

The parents are the first in Ventura County to have children after participating in the experimental paternal leukocyte immunization treatment, Nancy Francis said.

“We’ve been trying to have a baby for years, but we couldn’t because our bodies are too immunologically similar,” she said. “Doctors told us that the chances of them being this similar is 5 million to 1.”

Some studies suggest a similar immune system in couples somehow interferes with the mechanism that keeps the mother’s body from rejecting the fetus as a foreign material.

In the leukocyte immunization treatment, immune-boosting white blood cells are transferred from the potential father or a blood donor to the potential mother to improve the chances that the mother’s body won’t reject the fetus.

To participate in the program, the couple traveled to the University of Utah, where much of the research is being conducted. And they went to a satellite office in Ventura of the California Fertility Institute for two years.

“It took a lot of persistence and perseverance,” Nancy Francis said. “But we finally got what we’ve been wishing for.”