Parents of sextuplets share life's joy and sorrow

'It was really tough. I don't think we are the same people that we were before'

MARK HUME

Globe and Mail

18/04/07


VANCOUVER -- They seem like any ordinary new parents caught between bliss and exhaustion as they work shifts around the clock caring for the babies they have just brought home from the hospital.

But the young Jehovah's Witness couple sitting curled up on their couch, as the sun sets over their home in the Fraser Valley near Vancouver, have just been through an extraordinary experience that they say has changed them forever.

"It was really tough. I don't think we are the same people that we were before," said the father, a robust young man with dark hair, glancing at his wife. She has a pale complexion and had just let out a sigh after coming down from the nursery. She nodded silently and smiled as they exchange a knowing glance.

On Jan. 7, they became the parents of the first sextuplets born in Canada. It was hailed as a miraculous birth, but soon afterward two of the tiny premature babies, born at just 25 weeks gestation, died at B.C. Children's Hospital.


Within weeks, the four others -- two boys and two girls -- were seized by the Ministry of Children and Family Development to force blood transfusions as their hemoglobin levels dropped. That set off a continuing legal battle in the Supreme Court of British Columbia, in which the parents seek to define the boundaries between state powers and religious rights.

The parents are seeking a ruling that the ministry violated their constitutional rights when it apprehended the babies.

The couple, who cannot be identified under a court order meant to protect the family's privacy, recently brought three of their babies home; the fourth, a boy who remains in hospital, will soon join them.

Upstairs in the couple's modest but neatly kept row house, the three babies are sleeping, side-by-side in two cribs, under the watchful eye of a relative and the babies' older brother -- who can be heard cooing over the new siblings his parents had promised him.

The couple have remained isolated from the news media for the past three months, but they agreed to break their silence by sitting for a single interview this week.

They are relaxed now and able to laugh about the surreal experience. One day they were an ordinary couple leading a simple life in suburbia; the next they watched news bulletins about their famous babies flash across TV screens.

On the day the government seized the infants, however, the young couple were clinging together in a hospital room, weeping as they begged authorities not to give their babies a treatment they didn't feel was medically necessary and that violated their faith.

"I asked them not to do that. They had no emotions on their faces. It was just like, 'This is what we're doing,' and they walked out of the room," the mother said. "I can't understand how you can just watch two parents very upset, crying, 'Don't do this. This is our children.' And they just get up and walk away."

The babies were returned after a week, but by then they had all been transfused.

"Anyone who calls themselves a Jehovah's Witness does not accept blood transfusions," the father said. "It says it right there in the Bible," his wife added.

They were both raised Jehovah's Witnesses, and the issue of whether to allow blood transfusions should their premature babies need it, or the mother hemorrhage during birth, was never debated.

In their family it is clear: Faith comes first.

"We didn't even discuss it. We knew what we were going to do," the mother said.

She stressed that the decision was not something pushed on them by church leaders. "I guess my biggest thing is that people have been told . . . as a Jehovah's Witness we are forced into making decisions and we're influenced by people. I just want to make it clear that no one tells us what we should do," she said.

"People think that we are a cult and that we have a leader who tells us what to do. That is so not true. I do not let people tell me what to do."

Even though their babies did receive blood, their parents say that has not affected their feelings for them.

"The No. 1 thing [I want people to understand] is we are loving, caring parents. In the media it was portrayed that we don't care about our children. . . . Some people said, 'They want them to die.' Or they said, 'They don't care about their children because they are withholding medical treatment.' Which is completely inaccurate," the father said.

"Another misconception that people have is that after a transfusion we feel differently toward our children, that we don't accept them or somehow we don't love them as much," he said.

"Or we punish them," the mother added. "I don't look at them any differently because they got a blood transfusion. They were forced to have something that is against our belief."



Both parents said that having their children taken from them has left emotional scars. Asked whether she is still angry about it, the mother answers calmly.

"Yeah, but not like how I used to be . . . there's no point to being bitter and angry forever . . . [but] I'm angry that I was completely dismissed as a mother. . . . I was just disregarded."

Added the father: "My anger is that they can do this and not have to answer for it. That's the thing. There is a large loophole in how it works, the [Child, Family and Community Service] Act, that allows them to do this."

That argument is the subject of the court case to be heard later this year, and, while the legal case is important to the parents, they said that, for now, they are focusing on taking care of their babies.

The infants weighed only 700 to 800 grams at birth, but are now between two and three kilograms.

"They seem huge to us. Compared to what they were we say, 'Wow, they are growing so much,' and then when people see them they say, 'I've never seen a baby that small,' " the father said.

"I don't think they are that small," said the mother, who joked that she needs to grow two new breasts to feed them.

"I'm not Dairyland," she said.

Looking back on their experience, the couple said that much of it is a blur. So much happened so fast, and it was so out of the character of their simple lives that it left them bewildered at times.

"I wasn't expecting it was going to be as big as it was," the mother said.

The father, who is on an unpaid leave of absence from his job, said he is loving every minute he has with the babies and will stay home as long as he can afford it.

"Even when they are crying at night and you are dead tired and have 20 minutes of sleep, I still -- it sounds weird -- but I cherish getting up just because, who else would you want to have looking after your child? Who else would you want caring for them, feeding them, bathing [them]? As a parent, you always want to do that."

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