Dominika Clarke, who has a British husband, gave birth to the five babies at Kraków’s University Hospital after undergoing a caesarean section seven months into the pregnancy, Polish state news agency PAP reported.
The three girls and two boys are each some 40 centimetres tall and weigh between 710 and 1,400 grams, according to doctors.
The parents, Dominika and her husband Vince, gave the children the names of Elizabeth May, Evangeline Rose, Arianna Daisy, Charles Patrick, and Henry James, the PAP news agency reported.
Dominika Clarke told reporters: “A miracle has happened. I became pregnant with five babies. We had been planning an eighth child, but it turned out that the number of new babies would be bigger.”
The quintuplets have seven siblings, including two pairs of twins aged four and seven, as well as a 10-month-old, one child aged 10 and another aged 12, reporters were told.
The Clarkes live in the eastern village of Puchacze, but Dominika contacted the University Hospital in Kraków because she knew she would be well looked after there, thanks to the hospital’s experience with multiple pregnancies, she told the media.
The mother admitted to feeling mixed emotions ahead of going into labour, including “an anxiety about the children, about how things will turn out.”
But she said she was "now very well, better than I expected,” while the quintuplets “are stable and resting.”
Dominika met her husband in Britain, where she relocated after her studies to work as a math and English teacher.
They struck a friendship that later turned to love, the PAP news agency reported.
Today they are both entrepreneurs and plan to raise their quintuplets in their house with a garden, surrounded by a forest, Dominika Clarke told reporters.
(pm/gs)
Source: PAP, interia.pl