Kate Gosselin had a TV show called ‘Jon and Kate plus 8’ about her twins and sextuplets…but in a documentary I just saw about her, it said she was actually pregnant with seven babies–septuplets–and one was born dead…they showed the sonagram with seven babies…but now they call them sextuplets…technically, isn’t that incorrect? aren’t they technically the six remaining members of a set of septuplets, and not sextuplets? if you’ve got a set of triplets and one is hit by a car and killed, you don’t start calling the other two twins then, they are the surving two members of a set of triplets, no? why is this different?:dubious::dubious::dubious::dubious:
Had the 7th baby survived birth they would have been known as septuplets… being hit by a car assumes that they survived birth.
Having a family member who was pregnant with a child born dead, I am not about to argue with any parent who wants either to “count” it or not.
My ex-girlfriend did exactly that. She and her brother were two of a set of triplets, one of whom died in infancy. Everyone referred to the living pair as twins. If nothing else, it prevents having to recount your life story every time you mention it.
Here’s a question I hate dealing with:
How many children do you have?
Ditto…
I ask, “Now?”
i get it…if it was jon and kate plus nine it wouldn’t rhyme
Hear, hear. 
I recall Kate saying the doctors wanted to reduce the number of embryos. A standard procedure in these cases. She insisted on taking the risk of carrying them all to term. I think it could have gone terribly wrong. She was lucky getting 6 healthy babies.
I’d never thought about “reducing embryos” but it makes eminent sense.
But …
I have to say it’d feel mighty weird at age 10 or 15 or whatever to have your parents tell you “You all were sextuplets in the womb but we aborted three of them so the other three would have a better chance. You were the lucky winners. Happy Easter! Pass the potatoes.”
so why is kate gosselin so hated?
It’s believed that as many as 10% of human pregnancies start off as twins, and one baby does not develop for whatever reason. Chances are, that’s what happened in this case. If it happens early enough, the fetus is usually resorbed and unless an ultrasound was performed, nobody ever knows about it. My guess is that a similar thing happened here.
I’ve done a search and found very little information, and some of it was conflicting.
- when they first found out they were expecting multiples, they were told there were seven sacs and at least four of them contained embryos
- the seventh was miscarried soon after that
- the seventh baby was a girl
- the seventh baby wasn’t named
- the seventh baby was stillborn
I wonder if there was even a seventh embryo, or just a seventh sac.
in this case 7 was NOT a lucky number
I’m guessing when you’ve delivered 6 newborns in the same day, each one requiring feeding and diaper changing, it’s easy to overlook a stillborn. Much less emotional content than if you were only carrying one baby and that one was stillborn.
It was played down on the show itself, but outside of the show, Kate made quite a showing on the conservative christian anti-abortion circuit. So it seems that reducing the number of embryos would have been against her religious beliefs.
Jon and Kate Plus Nine Minus One would have just been to awkward.
Especially in later seasons: Jon and Kate Plus Nine Minus One Minus Jon
When the McCaughey septuplets were born, a local news station interviewed a couple in the area who had a septuplet pregnancy a few years earlier. They chose not to reduce it, and even though she miscarried the whole thing within a matter of days , they still felt they had made the right decision. They said, “We are not religious people, and we both have very strong pro-choice views. We just didn’t want to do that.” They later had a singleton, also conceived with fertility drugs.
Hard to believe those kids are all 16 years old now! I grew up in Des Moines (Carlisle is a small bedroom community just outside DSM) and they’ve always been a big story.
I’m always amused by the couples who have multiple embryos implanted and, when suggested that after the embryos ‘take’ that they reduce some of them, declare that that would be going against God’s Will. I mean, wasn’t it God’s Will in the first place that they couldn’t conceive naturally in the first place?