Quadruplets is 4 babies, not 5 (quints)...and we don’t know the history of this woman. The older the mother, the lower the chance of a successful singleton pregnancy (unless donor eggs or embryos have been used, then chances are a bit higher) In my case, we only had 2 embryos which we transferred, but at my ‘advanced maternal age’if we’d had more my doctor would have transferred 3 or 4 (with my daughter’s singleton pregnancy back then (38) I had 4 because we originally only had 3 fertilize, then one ‘caught up’ at the last minute, but the high expenses and low chances for a successful cryo storage for 1 embryo let us convince him to go ahead with all 4—the alternative was letting that embryo die naturally out of my body, and we didn’t want to do that-)—
anyway, this has opened the door to the ethics involved and the need for some regulation but you can’t just say 1 embryo transferred only because each patient’s situation is different and the experience of the doctor is vital in determining the potential odds in trying to achieve a successful SINGLETON pregnancy (the saying is that any doctor who has a bunch of triplets and higher multiples to his credit is a BAD doctor—and this doctor of Nadya’s looks to be the poster child for bad REs!!
Pet peeve: in fertility treatment, the doctor simply transfers embryo/s from a petri dish into a woman’s uterus via a catheter during a very simple procedure—then, God willing and the creek don’t rise, one of those embryos will implant in the woman’s endometrial lining of her uterus—the doctor has absolutely NOTHING to do with and is unable to ‘force’ an embryo to implant. So when people say ‘the doctor implanted’ embryos, that’s technically not true. He put back the embryos (like scattering seeds in the garden without digging holes for them)—God determines which ones flourish, not the doctors. It’s literally a crapshoot like Las Vegas! You can know the odds and little tips and secrets for winning, but there’s no guarantees whatsoever of success.
Medi-Cal doesn’t pay for the IVF, but they have to pay for the maternity care that follows when the mothers have no insurance and the baby care while they are in the hospital... I honestly do not think the State of California or any other state should have to foot the bill for these women and their babies.