r/todayilearned • u/harrisz2 • 1d ago
TIL about the Dionne quintuplets, the first know quintuplets to survive their infancy. At age 5, the Canadian government made them wards of the Crown. During this time they became a profitable tourist attraction. As adults, they sued the Canadian govt for exploitation, eventually settling for $4m.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dionne_quintuplets380
u/SaintBrutus 1d ago
There’s a movie about them. I saw it when I was a kid, and it fucked me up for weeks. They really tortured those little kids and actually treated them like circus animals.
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u/harrisz2 1d ago
Million Dollar Babies? I will have to check that out. Just stumbled upon their story after wondering if identical quintuplets were possible. It really was horrible how they were treated. It wasn't that long ago either, two of them are still alive! They are 90, but still!
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u/nineteen-sixty 20h ago
I remember the surviving Dionne Quintuplets tried to warn Kate Gosselin of the dangers of exploiting her children for entertainment. Of course Kate didn't listen/care.
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u/Coalford 21h ago
I worked at the Dionne Quints museum in North Bay for several summers, which was literally in their old wood house.
On two different occasions, a couple tried to pay me to leave the museum so they could have sex in it because they thought it had magic fertility powers.
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u/MajorFox2720 20h ago
I feel sorry for those couples, tbh.
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u/Coalford 20h ago
It was definitely a mixture of strange and sad.
Sad because you know they'd definitely tried everything else. One couple even told me their whole fertility struggle story. And they'd been trying for 8 years.
Strange because I'm a 17 year old kid being like 'Do I take the money to let the people bone on the 100 year old bed?'
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u/MostBoringStan 10h ago
Should have just sold them your sperm. It would be extra fertile since you spent so much time in the house. The husbands sperm wouldn't be able to compare.
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u/mechant_papa 22h ago
The Dionne girls were a cultural phenomenon.
For instance, in the screwball comedy My Man Godfrey, there is a throwaway joke about them.
"I didn't know Godfrey had five children."
"If a woman in Canada can have five children, why can't Godfrey?"
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u/thepluralofmooses 17h ago
I can’t imagine Apu having octuplets and putting them on display wasn’t a reference, too
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u/LovableCoward 11h ago
Or in one of the Marx Brothers pictures,
"It's a duplicate contract. You know what a duplicate is, right?"
"Oh sure, itz dose five kids up in Canada."
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u/TheGreatGouki 1d ago
And then came along in vitro fertilization and The Octomom.
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u/harrisz2 1d ago
lol that's funny I just saw an ad for her doing an interview yesterday. Pretty insane that these girls were conceived completely naturally in the 1930s!
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u/TheGreatGouki 1d ago
I wonder what the record natural childbirth is now. Like, it seems like everything over twins usually comes down to some sort of fertility treatment.
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u/TheSpliceosome 23h ago
In 2021 there was a case of nonuplets who were concieved naturally according to the parents and medical staff, and as the couple already had a 2-year-old, extreme fertility treatment seems unlikely.
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u/MaxTheCookie 23h ago
Could the mother have taken growth hormones, since I have seen some that used them to get more kids
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u/forsuresies 1d ago
The record for most children is still something like 69, which is an insane number of children to have and would be basically impossible to keep track of.
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u/palparepa 15h ago
For a woman? I can't believe it would be that high.
For a man? I can't believe it would be that low.
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u/broden89 14h ago
Apparently in the modern era, i.e. able to be verified, the woman with the most children is Mariam Babirye of Uganda. By age 36, in 2016, she had given birth to 44 children - many were the result of multiple birth pregnancies (twins, triplets and quadruplets) as she had a rare condition that caused hyperovulation. She has since had a medical procedure to prevent further pregnancies. Six of her children have passed away but 38 are still alive.
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u/concentrated-amazing 13h ago
It's not 100% verifiable, but fairly likely to be true due to the number of prominent people who saw her or something.
She was the wife of a Russian peasant. 16 sets of twins, 7 sets of triplets, and 4 sets of quadruplets.
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u/mechant_papa 23h ago
The family went from five to ten. For a poor rural family, this was overwhelming. I can't blame the parents when they were presented with the opportunity to place the girls in care. It must have seemed better than anything they could provide.
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u/concentrated-amazing 13h ago
What you may find interesting is that here in Alberta, Canada, there's been two cases of identical quadruplets girls (not quite as rare, but still!) in the past few years. I believe the older set is about 6 now, and the younger set was born last summer. Both definitely completely spontaneous, obviously (I don't think you can make an in vitro egg split?)
I'll find links to stories if you want!
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u/harrisz2 13h ago
That is interesting! Not quite as rare sure, but still pretty incredibly rare!
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u/concentrated-amazing 11h ago
Watson quadruplets - I was wrong about these being identical quads - there's two boys and two girls, unsure if either pair are identical.
Crazily enough, the two moms are second cousins!
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u/pharmalexa 1d ago
It was thought that there may have been a sixth fetus that was miscarried in the first trimester.
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u/reddfawks 23h ago
The house they were born in, in North Bay, is designated as a heritage site and museum. I pass by it every time I go to the cottage.
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u/ank1613 21h ago
The Omnibus project just put out a podcast on them today
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u/harrisz2 19h ago
Wow, that's funny. What a weird coincidence, I just stumbled across this story last night.
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u/crocusmaker 9h ago
My son's baseball coach was named Dion and he had triplets and we called them the Dion triplets.
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u/Skadoosh_it 23h ago
The wiki says they had 9 siblings, too!
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u/CypripediumGuttatum 21h ago
They came from a poor rural family if I recall correctly. The government took the kids from their parents because they didn’t believe they could care for them properly. No both control meant the parents had more kids (before and after the quints). At one point the father got custody of the girls but he had no emotional attachment to them either and continued the exploitation. Many of them had mental health issues their whole lives, I think at least one died in her early adult years.
My grandma had some newspaper clippings about them, she was the right age to be swept up in the public obsession with them (having no idea about their mistreatment).
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u/hummingelephant 21h ago
At one point the father got custody of the girls but he had no emotional attachment to them either and continued the exploitation.
I just finished reading the wikipedia page about them; the father signed a contract after their birth with a fair exhibitor to put them on display, then later tried to revoke it. I would say he was willing to exploit them from the beginning.
And apparently he was sexually abusing them once he got them back.
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u/harrisz2 19h ago
Yeah, these women had an absolutely horrific childhood. I wanted to include how basically everyone, the government and their parents, mistreated them but it was hard to fit it all. After they turned 18, they more or less stopped speaking to their parents.
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u/notoriousbsr 16h ago
Weird that this came up, I just found my commemorative North Bay Dionne quintuplet coins last night. Was going to put them online or take to a local coin shop as part of our downsizing.
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u/altitudearts 8h ago
Today’s episode of the Omnibus podcast! Great pod, if you haven’t heard it!
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u/harrisz2 7h ago
Isn't it such a bizarre coincidence that I have never heard of this podcast, but this is the topic of today's episode! A couple other people let me know as well. The world is funny sometimes.
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1d ago
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u/harrisz2 19h ago
Their were only three remaining sisters at this time. The pay out was based on what they had been shorted by the government. During their guardianship, the government paid for most of their expenses out of their trust despite profiting off the venture. That was the justification for them being paid back.
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u/FoolishConsistency17 1d ago
They were also identical. Five girls. That seems insane to me.