Woman delivers rare identical quadruplet girls in Queensland

A 34-year-old woman gave birth to identical quadruplet daughters at Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital in Queensland on July 14. The babies were delivered by cesarean section at 28 weeks gestation after the mother was admitted at 25 weeks. The family, which already had four children, now has eight.

Dr. Alexa Bendall, a fetal-medicine specialist who oversaw the case, said the pregnancy was the first of its kind for the hospital and that monozygotic quadruplets occur in roughly one in every 15 million pregnancies. She noted that the quadruplets share a single placenta, a circumstance she described as “unheard of.”

All four newborns are being cared for in the hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit and are reported to be “extremely well.” The parents named the girls Emily, Harriet, Alexa and Catherine, with one child named after Dr. Bendall.

"We have never seen a spontaneously conceived pregnancy of this type with quads, and [Na'amoana] has somehow dodged every complication and risk for both herself and her babies to be here today, with four gorgeous newborn girls," Dr. Bendall said in a video released by the hospital.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recorded only 144 quadruplet or higher-order births in the United States in 2024, underscoring the rarity of the event.