50-year-old grandmother gives birth to healthy quadruplets in million-to-one pregnancy

A grandmother has made history after becoming the oldest mom in Britain to give birth to quadruplets. People told her while she was pregnant that the children could not survive because of her age.

50-year-old Tracey Britten had three grown children and eight grandkids from her first marriage when she met her current husband, Stephen. Defying million-to-one odds, Tracey welcomed her quad- three girls and a boy- last month at 31 weeks.

MIRACLE BUNDLES

Her “bundles of joy” were delivered through cesarean by a team of 31 medics and immediately taken to intensive care.

Tracey, however, is optimistic about their health because the Quads have been making good progress. She told The Sun:

“I’m so grateful. I just can’t wait to get them home. The babies have not all been together yet, each hooked up to different machines.

It's been a whirlwind and I'm so grateful. One of the quads has had so many tubes around her that I haven't seen her face properly.”

The former drugs counselor, who described her latest additions as a “miracle,” is still deciding on names for all four. Tracey noted that she only wanted one child but was blessed with three more instead. She had no idea she would make history, and at her age, she had been told the kids couldn’t pull through.

IT COST A LOT OF MONEY

But Tracey, refusing to give up on her dreams of having a fourth child, sought treatment at the Kolan British IVF Center in Cyprus in April. The procedure cost £7,000, and as she previously told The Mail:

“We were desperate for another child and would have been ecstatic to have been having twins. But when the sonographer told me nine weeks into the pregnancy that I was carrying four babies, I burst into tears. Although I had four embryos implanted to maximize my chances of conceiving, never in my wildest dreams did I expect to have quads.”

POTENTIAL DANGER

On October 19, when Tracey went in for her 30-week scan, doctors discovered one of the babies was struggling with blood flow and that it could affect the others.

She was promptly admitted into the hospital, and on October 26, her four babies were delivered within a space of four minutes.

PUBLIC BACKLASH

An ecstatic Tracey had been criticized when news of her pregnancy broke. Many called her selfish and irresponsible, but she shot back:

“No one criticized Mick Jagger, Ronnie Wood or Elton John when they became fathers in their 60s and 70s, so why are they attacking me? I’ll cope better now than when I first became a mum in my teens and couldn’t help wondering what else I was missing out on. I’ve done everything I want to do now, so I’ll just be able to devote myself to my babies.”

MILLION-TO-ONE WHITE BABIES

Catherine Howarth is another woman who beat million-to-one odds by giving birth to two white babies. The black woman of Nigerian heritage and her white husband were shocked when their second child came out white after doctors told them the first was a one-in-a-million baby and calculated the possibility of it happening again as less than one in a million.

Read more here.