Texarkana Couple Defy One-in-a-Million Odds With Naturally Conceived Identical Triplets
A Texarkana couple welcomed identical triplets at Willis-Knighton Health System in Shreveport last month, beating odds so steep that even the doctor who delivered the boys called it “a really neat phenomenon.”
Mary Studebaker and Shane Perkins were already raising a 10-year-old daughter when they decided to try for one more child. They got three.
“Let’s just try for one more,” Studebaker said in an interview with KTEN. “And then all of a sudden, triplets.”
The boys — Thomas Ray, Shane Austin and Beaux Bentley — arrived Thursday, April 23, all within one minute of each other beginning at 7:52 a.m.
They were delivered at 31 weeks gestation, making them premature, with each newborn weighing between 2 and 3 pounds. They are expected to remain in the NICU for several more weeks to grow and gain strength.
A ‘Rare’ One-in-a-Million ArkLaTex Birth
According to KTEN, the odds of conceiving triplets naturally are about 1 in 10,000. The odds of conceiving identical triplets without fertility treatment 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.”
Higher-order multiple births have grown even rarer in recent years. A 2024 report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows the rate of triplet and higher-order multiple births reached an all-time high of 194 per 100,000 in 1998 before falling to 74 per 100,000 in 2023. Over that span, the annual number dropped from 7,625 to 2,653.
For Perkins, watching all three boys arrive in succession was overwhelming.
“I was scared to death,” he told KTEN. “I was just holding her hand. Especially when you see, well, one baby comes out, and then another, and then another.”
Can Triplets Be Identical? How It Happens
According to the Cleveland Clinic, triplets typically form when a mother produces and releases three eggs at ovulation that are each fertilized by sperm, or when a fertilized egg splits into three separate fertilized eggs.
So can triplets be identical? Yes — but only when they come from a single egg. That egg either splits into three, or splits into two and then one of those two splits again. Identical triplets almost always result in babies of the same sex.
Back home in the ArkLaTex region, the couple’s 10-year-old daughter is helping welcome her new brothers in her own way.
“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.”
Briery said spontaneous identical triplets are worth marking, no matter how rare. “Any time this happens, we should celebrate,” he told KTEN. “It’s just a really neat phenomenon.”
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