(ABC4) – Kevin O’Neill and Eric Portenga have proven the old saying “good things come in threes” to be true.
As noted by Cleveland Clinic, the couple has been enjoying their new life after becoming fathers to three rare identical baby girls born via surrogacy.
Parker, Robin, and Sylvie were born on Sept. 9.
“Now that we’ve got our babies, I just can’t imagine not having three,” O’Neill told Cleveland Clinic.
The partners took their time in researching their options to start a family before deciding on surrogacy.
“There’s a lot of challenges, not just financial ones as well. Then we put out into the universe that this is what we wanted, and one of our really good friends here knew Maureen, our surrogate, and she connected us,” O’Neill said.
“I knew in my heart it was something that I was called to do,” Maureen Farris, the family’s surrogate, told Cleveland Clinic.
O’Neill and Portenga opted to use an egg donor rather than having Farris be the biological mother. None of the three anticipated that the embryo would split into three.
“I remember just feeling really up for the adventure. It was like, well, ‘We’re here, we’re doing this.’ I felt very confident in my body’s ability to take on whatever was going to come our way,” Farris told Cleveland Clinic.
Due to the risky circumstances, Farris was monitored throughout her pregnancy. Thankfully, her delivery at Cleveland Clinic went smoothly.
“It was an uncomplicated cesarean birth. The little girls did well. They were managed by our NICU team. I believe all of them were born in the four-to-five pound weight range. They stayed in the NICU about two-to-three weeks,” said Stephen Bacak, MD, maternal-fetal medicine specialist for Cleveland Clinic.
