17 Aug 2007 Rare Identical Quadruplets Born; Already Mistreated by Canada’s Socialist Medical System
At the end of this sweet story about a Canadian woman, Mrs. Karen Jepp of Calgary, giving birth to a set of identical quadruplets (who were conceived without fertility drugs, the AP irrelevantly tells us) comes this:
The Jepps drove 325 miles to Great Falls for the births because hospitals in Calgary were at capacity.
How horrible it is that Canada couldn’t do better for these people. A couple with a two-year-old and four two-pound quadruplets who live in a major city ought to have been able to give birth close enough to their home to stay there at night after Mom is released (which in Canada was probably 39 seconds after the placenta is delivered, so they can give the bed to someone else), as the babies probably won’t be strong enough to go home for a while. Is the family being forced to live in a hotel room with a toddler, and then a successive number of newborns until all four are strong enough to leave the hospital? Or did the parents have to leave the two-year-old with relatives for goodness-knows-how-long in Calgary? Or maybe Dad has to leave Mom and the babies so he can go back to work, splitting the family for what could very wel be a couple of months?
If so, I guess Dad can just experience the first two months of his quadruplets’ lives some other year, right? And so what if the two-year-old misses his Mommy?
Do you suppose any of the politicians who mandated Canada’s socialist health system has offered to drive four newborns 325 miles, stopping every two hours to feed each one for about 15 minutes? Putting up with (most likely) a lot of crying in a very small space for a very long drive?
At least — we surmise — Mrs. Jepp got a hospital bed. In Canada, that’s not something that can be taken for granted.
P.S. A letter:
Good article. Here’s a related story with a detail that might get skipped over:Canadian Identical Quadruplets
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6951330.stm* The four girls were born at a US hospital because there was no space available at Canadian neonatal intensive care units.
* Health officials said they checked every other neonatal intensive care unit in Canada but none had space. The Jepps, a nurse and a respiratory technician were flown 500km (310 miles) to the Montana hospital, the closest in the U.S.
They couldn’t find ANY facility in ALL of Canada, but the CLOSEST U.S. facility “just happened” to be able to handle it.
Spokane, Missoula, and Great Falls are about equidistant from Calgary. GF does not involve crossing the Rockies in a (probably) small aircraft. None are very big cities – combined they are dwarfed by Calgary – but every other population center between them and Calgary would be very small indeed. Still, I’ll bet even some of them could handle four neonates. By land, they might have chosen one of those. By air, GF is as convenient.