On This Day in History: May 28

The Dionne Quintuplets

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The odds were one in 57 million. No fertility treatments. Just a married couple living in a farmhouse in central Ontario, Canada, who did what married couples do and happened to make five identical girls. Then the government took the babies away and put them on display. Because money.

--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: May 28, 1934--

The Dionne Quintuplets, born on May 28, 1934, were two months premature. Delivered by obstetrician Dr. Allan Dafoe and two midwives, they became the first quintuplets to survive to adulthood, but their childhood was totally fucked up.

News of the unusual birth spread, and everyone wanted a peek. The Chicago World’s Fair, with pressure from Dr. Dafoe and the family pastor, convinced the parents to sign a contract saying they could display the quints. But Mom and Dad realized their mistake and decided to sign them over to the Red Cross to get out of the state fair contract.

Instead, the parents went to Chicago to make stage appearances as the mother and father of the famous babies, and—hypocrisy alert!—the Premier of Ontario, Mitchell Hepburn said, “Oh, they’re bad parents who will exploit them, so let’s ram through the ‘Dionne Quintuplets Act’ so the government will be their guardians (and we can exploit them instead).” Paraphrased.

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Three thousand tourists a day flocked to the government-built nursery and controlled compound to watch them play. The kids had minimal contact with their parents, despite Dad setting up a souvenir shop across the street. The attraction was called “Quintland” and was the province’s biggest tourist trap of the time, netting more visitors than Niagara Falls.

The five girls appeared in three feature films, and were used to hawk products such as soap, toothpaste, and chocolate bars. And guess who was chief overseer of the girls? The same doc who delivered them. Dafoe made the modern equivalent of close to $3 million off them as the celebrity doc of the day.

The quints were returned to their parents when they were nine, but it wasn’t a happy reunion. Their parents, also made wealthy by their children’s labor, had since had three more kids, and treated the returning girls poorly. In 1995 the three surviving sisters accused their father of having sexually abused them as teens. Two years later they wrote an open letter to the parents of the newly born McCaughey Septuplets cautioning them to not put the babies’ lives on display because their lives “had been ruined by the exploitation we suffered.”

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