Multiple Births Create a Lot of Faces in the Crowd

Blessed by the support of a small and tightly knit community--not to mention the flattering glow of hundreds of television lights--Iowa’s McCaughey family has been deluged with offers of help for their newly born septuplets.

Most other families with large multiple births have far less luck.

As the number of multiple births rockets in the United States, pushed along by the increasing use of fertility drugs and rapid improvements in doctors’ ability to keep tiny premature infants alive, corporate America has been swamped with requests for aid. Inevitably, many families get far less than they had hoped.

Procter & Gamble Co., the giant consumer products firm that makes Pampers, now receives 170 requests each month for help from families with large numbers of children, according to Elaine Plummer, a company spokeswoman.

“We try to help as many as we can,” she said. But the company keeps its largess under control. Company policy provides a one-month supply of disposable diapers to parents of quadruplets. Families with quintuplets and sextuplets get six to eight weeks’ worth, Plummer said, adding, “We also provide diaper wipes.”

Beech-Nut, the baby food company, tries to “use a common-sense meter” to decide which families to help, says company spokesman Patrick Farrell. The company has offered a year’s supply of baby food to the McCaughey family, but for a family with twins it would generally provide just a starter kit, he said.

The company has no hard-and-fast rule about how large a family will trigger greater aid, preferring to weigh each family’s need individually, Farrell said. But “there are a lot of quadruplets out there now,” he added.

Of course, most families with multiple-birth children try their best to make ends meet on their own or with the help of relatives and close friends. But those who work closely with such families say both the public at large--and the families themselves--often have a misconception of how much help is available.

That gap between reality and expectations--not to mention need--leaves many disappointed.

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In the nation’s capital, for example, Jacqueline and Linden Thompson had sextuplets this summer, five of whom survived. The news barely made a ripple compared to the massive attention the McCaugheys’ have drawn, and the Thompsons’ friends say the family has received only scant amounts of help.

Because the family is black, some supporters have alleged that the relative lack of aid is a result of racism.

“Is it a racial issue? It makes you wonder,” said Linda Bugg, who heads a group, Sisters in Touch, that has tried to generate help for the Thompsons. “The majority of people in the black community are thinking it’s a racial issue.”

Friday, in response to press inquiries, Plummer said Procter & Gamble had never received a request from the Thompsons but would be happy to provide help to them. “We understand Mrs. Thompson has special needs, and we’re hoping to get in touch with her to discuss those.”

But even before that, those who work with families of multiples said the problems the Thompsons have encountered represent not issues of race but something even more pervasive: the nature of celebrity.

In a country where setting a record draws a flock of cameras but coming in second yields a polite handshake, the threshold for receiving publicity--and the outpouring of assistance that often goes with it--has been rising steadily.

Companies “are pulling up the drawbridge,” said Patricia Malmstrom of Twin Services, a Berkeley-based support organization for families with multiple births.

“It’s a totally different setting than it might have been” in earlier decades, adds Maureen Boyle, who heads Mothers of Super Twins, a Long Island, N.Y., support organization for parents. “People have a real misconception that what the McCaugheys have received is typical. Fifteen years ago, a woman having triplets or quads would have received free formula, baby food, a complete layette, shoes. None of those things are there now.”

Ramon and Marcella Quezada of West Hills, parents of quintuplets born in February 1995, were given a year’s supply of baby food from Gerber Products Co. and a variety of smaller gifts.

“Basically we live from paycheck to paycheck. We pay the baby sitters and buy food because we have to. I wouldn’t be able to work otherwise. The rest is deciding what bills we’re going to pay today,” Marcella Quezada said.

She said she was given a $4,000 gift for clothes from the Spanish-language television show “Sabado Gigante” as well as gift certificates for clothes and other smaller gifts while she was appearing on talk shows. But, a year and a half after her babies were born, she was no longer invited to make such appearances and gifts from outside groups stopped, she said.

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Patty Shier of Westchester, mother of quints born in January, was more fortunate. She said she and husband Scott “received letters and money in the mail. One little old man in a trailer park sent us $10.” The biggest gift, however, was from “Home and Family,” a cable television program. In April, “Home and Family” added on two bedrooms and a bathroom to the Shiers’ 1,100-square-foot house.

“We feel very blessed,” Patty Shier said. “People have been very kind to us. We most appreciate it.”

She said Ross Products, makers of Similac, provided a year’s supply of formula and that her church in Hermosa Beach, the Hope Chapel, donated a year’s supply of diapers.

A generation ago, births of triplets or more were still quite rare--about 1,000 a year--and quintuplets were still the largest number of human babies to be born alive. Now, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, the number of high-order multiple births, triplets or above, is closing in on 5,000 annually.

The country now has 47 sets of quintuplets and the first surviving sextuplets, born in Indiana in 1993, have been joined by two other sets, both in New York state.

Along with the numbers have come a change in demographics, notes Boyle. Births of five or more babies are often a result of in vitro fertilization, where doctors routinely implant several fertilized embryos in the hope that one will survive. In the early years of fertility treatments, insurance companies generally would not cover the costs of in vitro procedures, deeming them experimental. As a result, “the only people who could afford aggressive fertility treatments were people who were well-off financially.”

Now, with insurance coverage increasingly available, high-number multiple births have become more common in families that lack wealth.

Such families also generally lack wealthy neighbors--or the kinds of communities that can provide long-term help of the sort the McCaugheys seem likely to receive from their Iowa town.

The Thompsons, for example, lived in a relatively poor neighborhood of Washington when their children were born. Linden Thompson is an electrician. His wife is a former cashier and waitress. Norman Haner, father of the sextuplets born in Albany, N.Y., last year is a prison guard who, at the time of the births, was on disability leave.

“A lot of people who don’t have the resources are having higher-order multiples,” Boyle said. “As a nation, this is something we have to think about.”

Times staff writer Bret Johnson contributed to this story from Los Angeles.

* MOTHER AND CHILD

Bobbi McCaughey held one of septuplets for first time. A22