Shen Mingshen has been running around trying to raise money to pay for medical care for his four premature newborns, who are still in a neonatal intensive care unit after coming into the world after around seven months in the womb.
This was the second batch of babies to which Shen's wife has given birth, after she had a pair of premature girls in 2012, one of which is blind, the Shandong Business Daily reported. The health problems of the quadruplets are worrying the Heze, Shandong Province family, who have even considered giving up some of the children due to financial pressure.
"Their feet were purple when they came into this world," Shen recalled. The four, delivered via caesarean and weighing just 5 kilograms in total, were all barely clinging to life when they were born. The three girls and their brother had to spend their first few days in an incubator after getting insufficient oxygen during their birth.
'Pick your children'
Shen and his wife's experience of multiple births is not unusual in Heze, where people often have twins, triplets and even quadruplets and many try to choose the sex of their children.
For example, 31-year-old Wu Junping had five babies in January 2015, four daughters and one boy. However, the youngest girl died and the other four babies needed treatment in an intensive care unit. The biggest newborn weighed 2.2 kilograms and the lightest one only 2 kilograms, news portal iqilu.com reported.
The source of these multiple births is no mystery, as Heze is home to many clinics and hospitals that offer to give nature a helping hand when it comes to fertility. A reporter with news portal iqilu.com found that assistive reproductive technology is easily available after going undercover as an infertile man at a clinic in the city.
After consulting with a gynecology doctor in Laohuangkou Hospital, the reporter was advised to buy 10 bags of medicine to cure his problem, although his wife wasn't present and no physical checks were conducted.
The doctor claimed the medicine he offered could cure infertility and allow the reporter to decide how many children he would have and their sex for just a few hundred yuan.
"And I can guarantee you, with 80 or 90 percent certainty, that you can have boys if you want," the doctor said. The cost of ensuring a son is 600 yuan ($87) and the price for twins is 900 yuan, the doctor said.
"And if you want to have multiple births, you only need to consume medicine that causes more ovulation," the doctor told the reporter.
Drug abuse
While medicine which increases ovulation and other kinds of assisted reproductive technology are legal in China, prescribing them to people without first checking if they are suffering from fertility problems - as the Heze doctor approached by the undercover reporter did - is illegal.
Some hospitals, driven by their own interests, prescribe ovulation medicine to families who are eager to have babies immediately or who want multiple babies at one time, even though many are healthy, iqilu.com wrote.
"Ovulation medicine treats endocrine dysfunction and ovulation problems," Lian Fang, director of the reproductive health department at Shandong Chinese Medicine Hospital, was quoted by news portal iqilu.com as saying.
However this kind of medicine can harm the kidney function of women who do not require it, and can also cause premature and multiple births, Lian said. The claim that this kind of medicine can allow parents' to choose a child's sex is false, Lian said, explaining this is decided by genetics.
Sheng Yan, associate head of the Reproductive Hospital Affiliated to Shandong University, was quoted by the Shandong-based Jinan Times as saying that over 10 percent of families in China are suffering from infertility due to lifestyle reasons.
"Only mothers with ovulation disorders should receive treatment but some nonstandard clinics abuse these medicines, which raises the possibility of multiple births," said Sheng. Premature babies often suffer from organ failure or are underweight, he added.
Many of the women who have multiple and premature births live in rural areas and visit doctors at poorly regulated hospitals that are more interested in satisfying their patients' demands by giving them restricted medicines than abiding by regulations, the Jinan Times wrote.
China has no specific policy on families that have had multiple births, but Wang Zhongwu, a sociologist at Shandong University, has proposed introducing local regulations to offer subsidies to those in need of financial help.
