Can Triplets Be Identical? See How One Texarkana Family Beat One-in-a-Million Odds
“I was just holding her hand. Especially when you see, well, one baby comes out, and then another, and then another.”
Mary Studebaker and Shane Perkins were already parents to a 10-year-old daughter. They wanted to grow their family by one more — and ended up growing it by three.
“Let’s just try for one more,” Studebaker said in an interview with KTEN. “And then all of a sudden, triplets.”
The Texarkana couple, who live in the ArkLaTex region where Arkansas, Louisiana and Texas meet, welcomed three baby boys on Thursday, April 23, at Willis-Knighton Health System in Shreveport, Louisiana. The newborns — Thomas Ray, Shane Austin and Beaux Bentley — arrived within one minute of each other, starting at 7:52 a.m..
Can triplets be identical?
Can triplets be identical naturally? Yes — but it almost never happens. According to KTEN, the odds of conceiving triplets without fertility treatments are about 1 in 10,000. The odds of conceiving identical triplets naturally are closer to 1 in 1,000,000.
“This is a rare occurrence,” Dr. Christian Briery of Willis Knighton told KTEN of conceiving triplets without the help of IVF. “It happens in around one in 8,000 to 10,000 pregnancies spontaneously.”
The boys were delivered at 31 weeks gestation, making them premature, with each weighing between 2 and 3 pounds. They are expected to stay in the NICU for several more weeks to grow and gain strength.
For Perkins, watching three babies arrive one after another in the delivery room was overwhelming.
“I was scared to death,” Perkins told KTEN. “I was just holding her hand. Especially when you see, well, one baby comes out, and then another, and then another.”
A big sister with a plan fit for identical triplets
While their parents adjust to life with three newborns, the couple’s 10-year-old daughter has already figured out how to tell her brothers apart. She made each baby his own bracelet — color-coded so there’s no mixing them up.
“My 10-year-old actually made bracelets,” Studebaker told KTEN. “She has them color-coded — one’s green, one’s blue and one’s orange.”
Identical triplets are so rare partly because of how they form. According to the Cleveland Clinic, identical triplets come from a single fertilized egg that either splits into three, or splits into two and then one of those eggs splits again.
They almost always result in babies of the same sex — in this case, three boys.
The trend toward fewer multiple births makes the family’s story even more unusual.
A 2024 report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that triplet and higher-order multiple births peaked at 194 per 100,000 in 1998, then dropped to just 74 per 100,000 by 2023.
The total number of triplet and higher-order births fell from 7,625 to 2,653 over that span.
For Dr. Briery, the sheer rarity is exactly what makes this birth so worth celebrating. “Any time this happens, we should celebrate,” he told KTEN. “It’s just a really neat phenomenon.”
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