VIDEO: First Set of Septuplets Turn 18

Remember the famous case of the McCaughey family, where the wife gave birth to seven babies?

Well, they are full grown adults now. They just turned 18!

According to Viral 4 Real, doctors told her their survival rate was low and she had to make a tough decision.

Bobbi McCaughey was born with a malfunctioning pituitary gland and did not produce enough of the hormones to stimulate ovulation. Although they already had a daughter, Bobbi and her husband wanted more children. But they got more than what they bargained for.

One injection of the fertility drug Metrodin proved more than successful, and both she and her husband Kenny declined selective reduction after learning they were pregnant with seven children.

As her delivery date was closing in, doctors advised her to ‘let go’ of four babies, to increase the survival rate of the other three babies. But the couple stood firm. They wanted all seven babies delivered.

A miracle in itself, all seven children were born healthy, with some mishaps they went through and got over with, with the help of friends and family. Seeing how hard it was to raise 8 children all-in-all, family, friends, and even strangers chipped in to help the family.

They received generous donations including a 5,500-square-foot home, a van, a year’s worth of Kraft’s macaroni and cheese, and two years’ worth of free diapers. Among the offers was a full ride to Hannibal-LaGrange University in Missouri, which some of the McCaughey children are cashing in 18 years later.

When the septuplets celebrated their eighteenth birthdays, mother Bobbi told TODAY: ‘The years have flown by. There’s been so many things that have happened.’

Bobbi added: ‘Everything is a last. The last marching band performance. The last cross country meet. The last choir concert. It’s sad to see things end, but there will be lots of firsts coming.’

According to Wikipedia, the birth attracted significant media attention, both positive and negative, including a feature in Time magazine in December 1997. “In the beginning, for every ten letters we would get that were happy for us, we’d get one letter accusing us of exploiting the kids and being selfish to waste the world’s resources on a family this big,” said Bobbi in a 2007 interview.

“Our neighbors never gawked. Here in Carlisle they gave us privacy. But we had complete strangers come around to the back door, knock, and ask if they could hold a baby.”

The McCaugheys were the recipients of many donations, including a 5500 ft² (511 m²) house, a van and diapers for the first two years, as well as nanny services, clothes, and even the State of Iowa offering full college scholarships to any state university in Iowa upon their maturity and graduation from high school, also by the Hannibal–LaGrange University in Missouri.

President Bill Clinton personally telephoned the McCaugheys to wish them his congratulations.

By the time of the septuplets’ tenth birthday in 2007, the family was declining most requests for interviews, other than annual stories with KCCI (the Des Moines CBS affiliate) and Ladies’ Home Journal.