A mother beat staggering odds of 200 million to one to give birth to naturally conceived identical triplets – doubling the size of her family overnight. Sʜᴏᴄᴋed Katie Craw, 26, from Pentre Maelor, Wales, said she and partner Rob Ellis almost-fainted when they were told their second child was actually three at their 12-week scan.
Usually triplets are non identical and are created when two eggs are fertilised and one goes on to grow into twins. But Katie is one of just a handful of women in Britain to have identical triplets – known as monozygotic – where the fertilised egg splits into three after conception. It makes miracle tots Tommy, Joshua and Eddie – born by emergency cesarean on February 9, 2020 – genetically identical.
The couple already had a four-year-old son Jacob, born in 2015, and wanted him to be at school when they started trying for their second. Luckily Katie got pregnant the second month of trying and they excitedly prepared to welcome a new baby brother or sister. But going in for their 12-week scan at their local hospital, the Wrexham Maelor Hospital, they were about to get the shock of their lives. Katie wasn’t as far along as she thought and was only actually at eight weeks’ gestation with not one but three babies.
Katie explained: ‘Within five seconds of the sonographer having the sᴄᴀɴner on my tummy she asked me to take a deep breath in. I thought she was going to tell me some bad news but she just came out with I can see three heartbeats. I just knew she wasn’t joking. They kept saying to me you are taking this really well and I thought ‘I am not taking this really well!’
Two weeks later the couple returned for another scan where it was discovered that the babies each had their own sac of fluid. The pregnancy went swimmingly, with Katie seeing her midwife weekly and being scanned every fortnight to make sure the little ones were developing properly. But at 26 weeks, the consultants in Wrexham began to worry. The babies carried on growing at brilliant rates and Katie was booked in for a ᴄᴇsᴀʀᴇᴀɴ at 32 weeks – normal practice with multiple births. But at 28 weeks, Katie, a former prison worrker, began suffering contractions. She spent five days back in Liverpool as they tried to stop them and was then sent home for bed rest.
However at 30 weeks and one day, they started up again and she had an emergency cesarean on February 9,2020 with Tommy born at 17.50 weighing 2lbs 11.5oz, Joshua at 17.51 weighing 3lbs 4.5oz and Eddie at 17.52 at 3lbs 3.5oz. Katie was discharged after a week. Thankfully Josh and Eddie only spent almost seven weeks in hospital and Tommy came home ten days after them with the family together for the first time.
And she says the new family-of-six have been ʙᴏᴡʟᴇᴅ ᴏᴠᴇʀ by the kindness they have received from members of their community. Neighbours have even left packs of nappies and other supplies on their doorstep anonymously to help the young couple financially.
To form identical twins, one fertilised egg splits and develops two babies with exactly the same genetic information. This differs from fraternal twins, where two eggs are fertilised by two sperm and produce two genetically unique children, who are no more alike than individual siblings born at different times. Twins are more or less equally likely to be female or male. Contrary to popular belief, the incidence of twins doesn’t skip generations. That why her identical triplets from two eggs are rare. Twins conceived from one egg and one sᴘᴇʀᴍ are called identical or ‘monozygotic’ twins. The biological mechanisms that prompt the single fertilised egg to split in two remain a mystery.
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