Woman gives birth to identical triplets

Mother was impregnated with just one embryo that split twice, doctors say

updated 7:27 p.m. ET March 4, 2008

MANHASSET, N.Y. - When they get older, Logan, Eli and Collin Penn may blanch at the notion they wore nail polish to their first press conference. But it's the only way their parents know how to tell the boys apart right now. The identical triplets were born last Wednesday at North Shore University Hospital — an event so rare that an obstetrician estimated it might happen just once in 200 million births.

The triplets' mother, Allison Penn, was impregnated with just one embryo through in vitro fertilization, said Dr. Victor Klein, a specialist in multiple births and high risk pregnancies who delivered the boys. That embryo split in half and then one half of that split again, he said.

"This is the first one we're aware of in the literature in the country in which they only put back one embryo" and a woman gave birth to triplets, said Klein. "Most people put back two or three embryos and you just never know."

Klein said identical triplets are born at a rate between one in 60,000 and one in 200 million, depending on the research.

Allison Penn, 31, said she and her husband Tom, 46, had tried to have a baby ever since they got married about four years ago. Although she once thought of having several children, the disappointments over four years revised her dreams downward.

"When it took us so long to get pregnant, I just assumed we were going to have one and that would probably be it," she said. "So I thought one would be good."

Ed Betz / AP Allison Penn looks at her identical triplets, from left, Logan, Eli and Collin, on March 4, 2008 at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, N.Y.

And when she and her husband were told three youngsters were on the way?

"I looked over at Allison and her mouth was wide open and her eyes were like saucers and she didn't say a word," Tom Penn said. "Then I realized that it was possible and then I started to laugh."

He confessed he couldn't get over the irony.

"Everything we had done was to have one baby," he said. "Anybody who says God doesn't have a sense of humor. Everything we did was just for having one baby and now we have three."

10,000 diapers a year
Tom Penn, a wildlife biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, estimates that the family will go through 10,000 diapers a year, but North Shore University Hospital is donating a two-year supply for the boys, said executive director Susan Somerville.

The Patchogue couple is also relying on Allison Penn's mother, Marianne McGuire of Manchester, N.J., to help out with the eight feedings a day and other chores.