Mother who ignored doctors' advice to have an abortion after falling pregnant with quadruplets celebrates first birthday of four baby boys

A mother who doctors repeatedly told to have an abortion when she fell pregnant with quadruplets has celebrated the first birthday of her four baby boys.

Emma Robbins was advised that she should terminate two of her children to give the other two a better chance of surviving but the 31-year-old refused, telling doctors: “I’m keeping all four”.

Mrs Robbins conceived the boys naturally at odds of 750,000-to-one and now, a year after their birth, she has four happy and perfectly healthy children: Zachary, Joshua, Reuben and Sam.

Carrying on their odds-beating existence, the four boys were actually born on February 29 of last year, meaning they will only celebrate their real birthday once every four years. The odds of them being born on a leap day were 3.5 million-to-one.

Mrs Robbins and her 39-year-old husband Martin already had one son, three-year-old Luke, and couldn’t have imagined their family would be expanding quite so much when they decided to have a second child.

Speaking to the Daily Mail, Mrs Robbins said: “Never in a million years did we think we’d have four babies at once. I’d be lying if I said it was easy, but we’re so glad we never gave up on our babies.“

On the subject of the doctors’ concerns over the pregnancy, Mrs Robbins said she felt under “enormous pressure” to have an abortion, but added that the thought of doing so “broke my heart”.

She said: “Each time I went to the hospital it was all about the risks and asking me to consider aborting the twins to save the other two babies. But I knew that each time I looked at my surviving babies I’d also be thinking about the ones I’d lost.”

The boys were eventually born two months early and delivered by Caesarean section.

They were able to be taken home two months later, which Mrs Robbins says, is when the hard work really kicked in.

With four breastfeeds every four hours, day and night, and around 30 nappy changes a day, the boys are proving something of a handful.

“Life was exhausting,” Mrs Robbins said, adding: “When they’re all in the buggy together it weighs ten stone. Pushing it is a serious workout.”