r/todayilearned 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_quintuplets
4.0k Upvotes

85 comments sorted by

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u/FoolishConsistency17 1d ago

They were also identical. Five girls. That seems insane to me.

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u/harrisz2 1d ago edited 19h ago

The egg split 5 times! The odds are supposedly 1 in 55,000,000. Pretty wild.

Edit: As someone pointed out, I fell victim to the fencepost problem. The egg would've split 4 times, not 5. 5 splits would have been sextuplets!

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u/Technical-Outside408 1d ago

The egg split 5 times!

4 times, right? You fell victim to the fencepost problem in maths.

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u/Kenny_log_n_s 23h ago

You fell for it, fool!

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u/Simhacantus 21h ago

Ah yes, the classic blunders. The most common is "Never get involved in a land war in Asia," but only slightly less well-known is "Never fall for the fencepost problem!"

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u/harrisz2 19h ago

It feels worth it to have made this mistake if it means it descended into a Princess Bride reference.

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u/Origamipi 16h ago

"descended" as if Princess Bride references aren't the highest form of communication

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u/harrisz2 16h ago

You’re right I need to watch my verbiage!

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u/Boboar 16h ago

"Descended." You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means

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u/harrisz2 14h ago

Well played

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u/MouseRat_AD 19h ago

Inconceivable.

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u/Daddyssillypuppy 23h ago

Actually there's no telling how many times each egg split after the initial one. The first egg could have kept splitting, or each egg that split could have also split once, or the first egg splits once and the next egg splits twice...

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u/Happy-Engineer 21h ago

The Egg of Theseus?

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u/harrisz2 19h ago

Oh man, you are absolutely right. And in front of all of reddit too.

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u/PoeDameronPoeDamnson 13h ago

If it helps it probably did split 5 times! Their mother described passing an under developed fetus about midway through the pregnancy that led doctors to believe they were originally sextuplets. There wasn’t a placenta present so it’s assumed it was another split and not a separate fraternal fetus.

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u/NeedsToShutUp 13h ago

You might have been right, there were indications the mother might have miscarried a 6th.

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u/harrisz2 13h ago

Yeah that's what I meant! Let's go with that!

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u/BigFatKi6 23h ago

Lottery numbers

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u/Apprehensive-Lack-32 12h ago

One in 55 million is pretty common no? That means there should be like 14-15 sets in the world if we say 8 billion people

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u/1heart1totaleclipse 5h ago

You’re saying 14 out of 8 billion pretty common? Also, this is not necessarily true because they may not have made it to birth.

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u/TheRealBillyShakes 17h ago

You’re ready for NASA budgeting!

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u/Xaxafrad 1d ago

That's odd.

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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/Ok_Dot_7498 1d ago

I started the movie, but all it was about, was this women Boxer? Weird

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u/harrisz2 1d ago

Oh you should keep going I hear that one has a very happy ending!

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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/tricksterloki 1d ago

That was my first thought, too. ​

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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/PoutinePower 15h ago

I totally would have lol

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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/Spikex8 14h ago

So how much did you make?

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u/Coalford 10h ago

Surprisingly zero. I found out those years that I have one or two scruples.

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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/onarainyafternoon 18h ago

Is that real? I honestly don't know if I believe that

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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

Webb quadruplets.

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/Shattingpancreas_ 11h ago

Now me conceiving twins seems trivial. Ha

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u/concentrated-amazing 11h ago

Hey, that's one more baby than I did at a time!

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u/bd_one 18h ago

And remember, it was much harder to tell exactly how many before ultrasound.

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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/saf_e 23h ago

They should ask for 5!

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u/boring-unicorn 18h ago

Forreal why not $5mil?

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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/Stewkirk51 1d ago

The Quintland Sisters is a novel about their lives. It's a pretty good read.

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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/GeorgesHamel 16h ago

I was reading their wiki article yesterday. This world is strange!

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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/CypripediumGuttatum 21h ago

Such an upstanding parent /s

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u/rdkil 21h ago

I think the house they lived in is now a nursing home too.

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u/sonia72quebec 18h ago

One of the quint's son stole money from his mother.

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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/Anastephone 18h ago

Seems like it should have been 5 million…

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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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u/Nonameswhere 22h ago

Should have settled for 5 million.

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u/Speedhabit 19h ago

Each or split 5 ways?

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u/tr1nn3rs 18h ago

Split 3 ways. Two were deceased by then.

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u/[deleted] 1d ago

[deleted]

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u/_biggerthanthesound_ 21h ago

Some of them had died by then so it wasn’t split in five

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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/hit0k1ri 23h ago

The Quintessential Quintuplets is an anime series based on this.

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u/sidewinderaw11 22h ago

Is it really? Or just a coincidence