Five sets of twin babies born at Mercy Hospital

Doctors and nurses with Catholic Health’s Mercy Hospital are seeing double — having helped deliver and care for five sets of twin babies during a two-and-a-half week span between December 2022 and early January.

Since twins only account for about three percent of live births, according to the National Institutes of Health, having five in a row was unprecedented for the hospital’s Mother/Baby and Neonatal Intensive Care Unit teams who were excited to participate in what they are referring to as a “twin-demic.”

“It’s raining twin babies,” Dr. Swarna Devarajan, chair of pediatrics and director of neonatology at Mercy, said. “It’s just awesome. It lifted everyone’s morale. I can’t explain how happy it is. You just have to experience it.”

Throughout her 30-year career in medicine, Devarajan had never seen or experienced anything quite like this.

“The birth of a baby is such a miracle, and having one after another it is so fascinating,” Devarajan said. “It’s a lot of excitement but it’s also a lot of responsibility.”

Devarajan has cared for more than 4,000 newborns in her 24-year tenure at Mercy. While the staff could not have possibly expected such a turn of events, Devarajan said they were more than familiar with multiples.

In 2022, there were a total of 14 sets of twins born at Mercy hospital, according to hospital records. And in 2021, there were 10, including a set of triplets — Gerardo, Thiago, and Axel — who spent about a month in the NICU and celebrated their first birthdays.

“We’re always prepared,” Devarajan said. “We know what we’re doing because all we do is babies.”

The five twins born at Mercy include two sets of identical twins and three sets of fraternal twins who were delivered at 32, 34, 35, 36, and 37 weeks.

The boys all spent time in the hospital’s Level III NICU where they received some extra love and care, while one pair of identical twin girls got to spend time with their parents before going home with their parents.

Maggie and Stephen Hernandez of Long Beach gave birth to two identical twin girls, Margo and Lucy, making them the third of five to have their twins delivered at Mercy Hospital. 

“In the months leading up to it, it was scary,” Stephen Hernandez, said. “But when we got to Mercy they immediately quenched that fear. For something that caused months of worry, they made it so seamless.”

He said that the staff made them and their twin daughters feel like Mercy celebrities for four days before they could go home to meet their big sister, Jetty, who is just 14 months old.

“The staff there treated us with very personal care,” Hernandez said. “Anything you need they were there before you asked for it.”

Margo and Lucy had just celebrated one month since they were born when The Herald spoke with their parents.

“Twins don’t really run in the family,” Hernandez said. “We really didn’t know until the fourth sonogram.”

According to the National Center for Health Statistics, the twin birth rate has risen 70 percent since 1980. It has also risen for triplets and multiples, but this figure has started to slow since 1998.

Multiple pregnancies typically occur when more than one egg is fertilized, as is the case with fraternal twins, but it can also happen when one fertilized egg splits in two creating identical twins.

Stanford Medicine Children’s Health suggests that the probability of having twins is based on several factors including heredity, older age, high parity — having one or more previous pregnancies — and race. They also identify that ovulation-stimulating medicines and assisted reproductive technologies can also be causes for multiple births.