Three baby boys born in South Los Angeles this month tipped the scales at a combined 19.3 pounds, an extraordinarily heavy delivery for triplets that has their parents' household buzzing. Nyla Craft and Marco Bernal welcomed sons Elio, Elias and Enzo on August 18, a date that happened to fall on the father's own birthday.
Each of the three boys weighed more than 6 pounds individually, according to CBS News Los Angeles, which reported the triplets were delivered under the care of Dr. Rohit Passi, chief of neonatology at Kaiser Permanente South Bay Medical Center. Two of the three babies are identical twins, the station noted, adding another layer of rarity to an already unusual birth.
The triplets join two older siblings already in the household, meaning Craft and Bernal are now raising five children under the age of 5 in South Los Angeles, per the same report. That kind of household scale on its own presents significant caregiving and financial demands, even before accounting for the logistics of three newborns arriving at once.
How Close to the World Record?
The Craft-Bernal triplets came close to, but did not break, the Guinness World Record for heaviest triplets at birth. That record belongs to the Wilson triplets, born in Englewood, Colorado, on July 29, 2003, who weighed a combined 22 pounds 12.6 ounces, according to Guinness World Records. That leaves the South Los Angeles trio roughly 3.5 pounds shy of the official mark, even as some initial coverage framed the birth as nearing record territory.
The Los Angeles triplets do sit remarkably close to a California benchmark. In November 2012, Sacramento mother Brittany Deen delivered triplets at Sutter Memorial Hospital weighing a combined 20 pounds after carrying them to 37 weeks gestation, as reported by CBS News. Deen reportedly had to consume up to 6,000 calories a day during her pregnancy to sustain that fetal growth. A similar case unfolded in March 2016, when a Knoxville, Tennessee, mother gave birth to triplets weighing a combined 19.6 pounds at 34 weeks gestation, according to Us Weekly, underscoring how rare triplet births approaching 20 pounds are across U.S. clinical history.
Why Triplets This Heavy Are So Unusual
The numbers behind the Craft-Bernal birth become even more striking when measured against national averages. The average birth weight of a single triplet infant in the United States is approximately 3.5 pounds, roughly half the weight of a typical single newborn, according to CDC birth data cited in a Facebook post from World News Tonight. That means each of the three South Los Angeles boys was born at nearly double the expected weight for a triplet.
Federal health records also show the average gestational age for triplet pregnancies is just 33 weeks, with more than 90% of triplets delivered preterm, compared to about 10% of singleton births, per the same account. Physical space constraints in the womb typically restrict how large multiple fetuses can grow, which is part of why full-term or near-full-term weights among triplets are so uncommon. It remains unclear from available reporting exactly what gestational age the Craft-Bernal triplets reached at delivery.
A Broader Decline in Triplet Births
The South Los Angeles birth also arrives against a backdrop of declining triplet deliveries nationwide. Triplet births in the United States peaked in 1998 at 193.5 per 100,000 live births before falling by more than half to 71.3 per 100,000 live births, or 2,444 triplet births nationwide, by 2022, according to the CDC's National Vital Statistics System. Fertility experts have attributed the decline in part to refined reproductive technologies and a shift toward single-embryo transfers, which have led to fewer higher-order multiple pregnancies over the past two decades.
California itself records roughly 400,000 live births per year, with Los Angeles County representing the largest share of deliveries across the state's healthcare facilities, according to the California Department of Public Health. Kaiser Permanente operates multiple major medical centers across Southern California, including the South Bay facility where the Craft-Bernal triplets were delivered. Open questions remain about whether the pregnancy was conceived spontaneously or through fertility treatment, and how the family plans to manage the logistical and financial demands of raising five young children at once.
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