History Main / TooManyBabies

* ''Manga/OnePiece'': Subverted with Charlotte "Big Mom" Linlin - she gave birth at least once a year for 42 years, resulting in a total of 85 children (including at least eight sets of twins, two sets of triplets, a set of quadruplets, a set of quintuplets and a set of ''decuplets''), but apparently never had any trouble with any of them, aside from most of them growing up to be just as unpleasant as their mother. It helps that's she's extremely wealthy due to being a pirate empress.

** In order to not look ''completely'' crazy she claimed to have only implanted 6 left-over embryos (of which 2 then split into twins) because she didn't want any of her babies to die. She was [[BlatantLies lying]] on both fronts: the doctor implanted 12 embryos. And she insisted on fresh embryos for each of her IVF-cycles, so there are still some of her embryos left in the freezer.

Contrast ExplosiveBreeder, a character or creature for whom a huge litter of babies is normal. Compare and contrast MassiveNumberedSiblings, when there's a large number of children but they were born one (sometimes two) at a time.

Pregnancy with multiples is more challenging than pregnancy with twins or a single baby. If the work acknowledges this, the difficulty begins before the babies' birth. The mother may feel strained to her limit as her belly swells to preposterous size and her body's metabolism is stressed. More importantly, it is prone to [[ImperiledInPregnancy complications and risks]] that may need medical attention or hospitalization. And because the babies are likely to be born early, there may be PrematureBirthDrama when they arrive. [[LighterAndSofter Understandably]], the work may [[OutGivingBirthBackInTwoMinutes gloss over all that]] in favor of skipping straight to the CutenessOverload that a bunch of babies embody.

A woman gave birth to multiple babies at the same time, and now she, with help from her husband, has to figure out how the heck to deal with this many kids at once. HilarityEnsues.

Often the defining feature of works that it appears in for the simple reason of plausibility. Babies are a lot of work, and anyone who has this many is pretty much going to have to center a great deal of her life around them. While one would think that this would make the parents a little high-strung and frustrated with their baby-centered lives, quite often BabiesMakeEverythingBetter anyway, despite the extremity of the situation. When used as a brief gag, it's usually tongue-in-cheek.

This trope came to prominence because of the relatively high chance of multiple births in the early days of in vitro technology. This was due to the procedure (no longer practiced by most above-board facilities) of implanting multiple embryos under the assumption that only one would actually take. While this is the extreme version of the trope, more down-to-earth works of fiction can still play this up with twins.

* ''Film/RaisingArizona'' has this as a set-up: Herbert's poorly thought-out plan to have a child with his wife involves kidnapping one of the Arizona Quints, reasoning that the parents wouldn't mind losing just one. (He gets the idea from reading an interview with the father, who had jokingly commented that "We've got more than we can handle!")

Compare and contrast MassiveNumberedSiblings, when there's a large number of children but they were born one (sometimes two) at a time.

A woman has babies. That is, she gave birth to multiple babies at the same time, and now she, with help from her husband, has to figure out how the heck to deal with this many kids at once. HilarityEnsues.

* For a darker [[DeconstructedTrope deconstruction]] of this, many cultures view the birth of twins as a bad omen, which may lead to them being killed shortly after birth.

* Even for a single pregnancy, Suleman was outdone by Malian woman Halima Cisse, who denies any fertility treatments, and had ''nine'' in May 2021. She'd expected seven, which would also fit the trope, but was surprised by two more at delivery. As of June 2022, all nine babies are still alive and reportedly doing well.

-->Did I ever tell you that Mrs. McCave

* Even for a single pregnancy, Suleman was outdone by Malian woman Halima Cisse, who denies any fertility treatments, and had ''nine'' in May 2021. She'd expected seven, which would also fit the trope, but was surprised by two more at delivery. As of September 2021, all nine babies are still alive and reportedly doing well.

[[folder:Film]]

* This is Shrek's nightmare in ''WesternAnimation/ShrekTheThird''.

** The same plot is reused in the MickeyMouse short "Mickey's Nightmare", which as the title suggests, is AllJustADream.

* ''Quints'', a Creator/DisneyChannel Original movie about a teenage girl who gets five younger siblings at one shot and has to take care of them.
* ''Half a Dozen Babies'', about a couple that have sextuplets.

* ''Dorrie's Book'' by Marilyn Sachs is about a child whose mother's second pregnancy unexpectedly results in triplets.

Compare and contrast MassiveNumberedSiblings, when there's a large number of children but they were born one at a time.

* ''Series/{{Friends}}'': In season four Phoebe acts as a surrogate for her half-brother and his much older wife. She's implanted with five embryos and eventually learn that three of them have successfully attached. Frank and Alice insist they'll try to make it work but Phoebe still feels guilty and offers to help them raise some money to cover their expenses. Several seasons later Frank admits that he and Alice are exhausted from having to take care of three kids. He tries to ask Phoebe to take one of the triplets off their hands but when pushed he can't bring himself to give any of them up.

[[quoteright:275:[[WesternAnimation/TheSimpsons https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/rsz_dh.png]] ]]

* One of ''Daria'' BigNameFan Roger E. "The Angst Guy" Moore's works, ''Quinnts'', splits the title character's sister, Quinn, into a set of, appropriately enough, quints, who each embody an aspect of the canon Quinn's personality (bossy, hedonistic, rambunctious, psuedo-intellectual and attention-seeking, respectively). Predictably, their version of Daria is a complete emotional wreck.

* ''Manga/OnePiece'': Subverted with Charlotte "Big Mom" Linlin - she gave birth at least once a year for 42 years, resulting in a total of 85 children (including at least eight sets of twins, two sets of triplets, a set of quadruplets, a set of quintuplets and a set of ''decuplets''), but apparently never had any trouble with any of them, aside from most of them growing up to be just as unpleasant as their mother.

* ''WesternAnimation/EveryDogsGuideToThePlayground'' (NFB of Canada, dir. Les Drew, 1991) closes with a very pregnant Honey going into labor, causing her husband Bernard to faint. The family dog, Wally, then packs everyone into a child's wagon, and wheels them to a hospital. There, a waiting Bernard receives his wailing children fresh from the delivery room. All 32 of them. He sounds rather displeased at this development.

* Website/Cracked presents a parody of Reality TV shows on the subject: [[https://youtu.be/RP8ZbGMjwOE Katie and Katie Plus Eighty]]. The Katies are, of course, out of their minds with stress.