Wide Awake for Quads

The chance that any woman will give birth to live, healthy quadruplets is about one in 2,500,000. So when X rays showed that Barbara Axe, 26, was carrying quads, she felt challenged. She told her obstetrician: "I'm snoopy. If you're likely to make medical history, it would be nice to see it." Last week she made it and saw it.

Husband Philip, advertising promotion man for the Lima (Ohio) Citizen, was taking a nap when Barbara felt the bag of waters break. A registered nurse and already mother of three, she calmly phoned for an ambulance before awakening her husband. And at St. Rita's Hospital, where Dr. Vernon Noble found her in excellent health, she got just the sort of treatment she had asked for: only a local anesthetic before delivery. Baby girl No. 1 (4 lbs. 2 1/2 oz.) arrived at 3:27 p.m.; No. 2 (same weight) at 3:29; No. 3 (2 lbs. 9 1/2 oz.) by breech delivery at 3:40 p.m.; and No. 4 (3 lbs. 12 1/2 oz.) at 3:45. As each baby was born, Dr. Noble held her up and the mother listened to their successive cries.

Barbara Axe seemed faintly disappointed that the babies were all girls. But she had another kind of compensation. Around Lima, scarcely one out of 20 mothers watches the birth of her own children, but she had combined her curiosity with her condition to hit a 50 million-to-1 shot and see the delivery of her own quadruplets.

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