New Quads on the Block : Fertility Treatment Helps Woman, 50, Give Birth to 4 Babies

A 50-year-old Lompoc grandmother who received fertility treatments at a Northridge reproductive center delivered healthy quadruplets Thursday, apparently the oldest woman to have four children at once, hospital administrators said.

“We wanted a child to make our marriage complete,” said beaming dad Robert Fillippini, a 49-year-old welder with the Lompoc Unified School District.

“To be blessed with four is just a miracle.”

His wife, Cheryl Fillippini, a former neonatal ward nurse and recent law school graduate, gave birth to the babies--three girls and a boy--between 8:30 and 8:33 a.m. with the aid of 20 physicians and nurses, said Janet O’Neill, a spokeswoman for Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital.

Robert, Rebekah, Amanda and Sydney were underweight and more than two months premature when they were delivered by caesarean section, according to O’Neill.

They will remain hospitalized in the neonatal intensive care unit, which has been affectionately renamed the “quad pod,” until they gain weight and develop their lungs and sucking reflexes. Robert weighed 2 pounds, 1 ounce, Rebekah 3 pounds, 1 ounce, Amanda 3 pounds, 4 ounces and Sydney 2 pounds, 6 ounces.

The couple, who married three years ago and together have 10 children by previous marriages, confirmed they had sought fertility treatments twice in the past two years at the Greater Valley Center for Reproductive Medicine in Northridge. But at a news conference outside Cottage Hospital on Thursday, Robert Fillippini declined to comment on what method of in vitro fertilization they used.

“I’m not going to talk about that,” he said. “But I will say our doctor was great.”

Typically, the reproductive facility uses a procedure that removes a woman’s eggs and fertilizes them in a dish before injecting them into the upper uterus, according to the center’s director Dr. Gary D. Hubert. “It takes three weeks from start to finish,” he said.

Hubert said his facility has a 50% per-try pregnancy rate and provides two additional attempts free if the first try is unsuccessful. But he added: “It can get expensive.”

Certainly, that will be the case with the quads’ birth. Hospital officials estimate the bill for bed space and obstetrics, not including the delivery of the infants, could top $400,000. And that’s if there are no complications.

Then there’s the issue of whether the parents, who will both be eligible to draw Social Security by the time the babies reach their teens, should have sought the medical procedure in the first place.

“I can understand how it would raise a lot of eyebrows,” Hubert said of the ethical concerns. “But nowadays women are living longer, are in better health and in many cases are better able to handle the physical challenges of pregnancy.”

He added: “We don’t withhold reproductive treatment on younger women who might be even less healthy than this particular patient.”

Quadruplets occur naturally in about one in every 729,000 births. Since the early 1970s, however, the rate of so-called “high-order” multiple births--more than twins--has tripled, largely due to the use of fertility drugs and in vitro fertilization, in which doctors implant a number of fertilized eggs, presuming that some will not survive.

Many of the babies require extensive medical treatment as a result of low birth weight and a host of other medical complications. The American Society of Reproductive Medicine has said that it was considering limiting the number of embryos transferred during in vitro fertilization to four for women age 34 or younger.

“Most people want twins, but obviously we don’t want high multiple births,” Hubert acknowledged. “This was a side effect of her treatment,” he said.

At the hospital, meanwhile, Robert Fillippini was basking in the glow of fatherhood as well-wishers sent cards, and a baby food company and diaper manufacturer offered free goods.

“They may help me stay younger,” he said of the quadruplets. “They won’t let me be lazy. They’ll keep me busy.”

And he added: “We’ve been through this before. We know the shortcuts.”

Cheryl Fillippini has seven children--the oldest is 33--from a previous marriage and six grandchildren, the oldest is 12. She attended Santa Barbara College of Law while working as a nurse and raising her three youngest children. Robert Fillippini has three children from a previous marriage, the oldest is 22, he said.