How many babies can be born at once
South African woman gives birth to 10 babies in Pretoria - reports
Published
Update 23 June 2021: The Gauteng Provincial government has since released a statement saying medical tests show that Gosiame Sithole had not given birth recently, and nor had she been pregnant.
Image source, African News Agency (ANA)
Image caption,Gosiame Thamara Sithole, pictured here a month ago, gave birth on Monday
A South African woman has reportedly given birth to 10 babies in what would be a new world record.
Gosiame Thamara Sithole's husband says they were astonished by decuplets after scans only showed eight in the womb.
"It's seven boys and three girls. I am happy. I am emotional. I can't talk much," her husband Teboho Tsotetsi told Pretoria News after the birth.
One South African official confirmed the births to the BBC, however another said they were yet to see the babies.
A family member, who did not want to be identified, told the BBC that Ms Sithole had had 10 babies - five via natural birth and 5 via caesarean section.
Guinness World Records told the BBC it was investigating Ms Sithole's case.
A woman who had eight babies in the US in 2009 currently holds the Guinness World Record for the most children delivered at a single birth to survive.
Last month, 25-year-old Halima Cissé from Mali gave birth to nine babies, who are reportedly doing well at a clinic in Morocco.
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Most pregnancies involving large numbers of babies end prematurely, says BBC Africa's health reporter Rhoda Odhiambo.
Multiple births involving more than three babies are rare and often the result of fertility treatments - but in this case the couple say they conceived naturally.
Prayers and sleepless nights
Ms Sithole, 37, previously gave birth to twins, who are now six years old.
She is said to be in good health after delivering 29 weeks into her pregnancy in Pretoria on Monday evening.
Speaking to Pretoria News a month ago, Ms Sithole said her pregnancy was "tough at the beginning" and she had prayed for a healthy birth, with many a sleepless night worrying about what was to come.
"How would they fit in the womb? Would they survive?" she asked herself, but was reassured by doctors that her womb was expanding.
Image source, Getty Images
Image caption,Most pregnancies involving large numbers of babies end prematurely
When it was thought she was carrying eight foetuses, Ms Sithole was suffering leg pains and doctors found that two of the eight "were in the wrong tube".
"That was sorted and I have been okay since then. I can't wait for my children," she told the newspaper at the time.
Her husband also said he was over the moon, and felt like "one of God's chosen children. It's a miracle which I appreciate".
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Media caption,Nigeria's twin town: Igbo-Ora has an unusually high birth rate of twins
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How many babies can fit inside one woman?
How many babies can fit in a woman?
A woman gave birth to octuplets in California Monday after 30 weeks of pregnancy. The six boys and two girls ranged in weight from 1 pound, 8 ounces, to 3 pounds, 4 ounces.
How many babies can fit inside a pregnant woman?
There’s no scientific limit, but the largest reported number of fetuses in one womb was 15. In 1971, Dr. Gennaro Montanino of Rome claimed to have removed 15 fetuses from the womb of a 35-year-old woman. The largest number of babies ever delivered was in Australia in 1971, when a 29-year-old women gave birth to nonuplets. They all died. (Decaplets were supposedly born in Brazil in 1946, but that report is unconfirmed.) The largest set of children to be born together and survive—not including this week’s octuplets, who are all still alive—is seven. A set of septuplets born in Iowa in 1997 became the first to survive infancy. At least two more sets of septuplets have since been born and survived.
How do so many babies fit in one woman? The limit isn’t so much the number of babies as their volume and weight.
In general, once the total weight of the babies inside reaches about 12 pounds, the uterus goes into labor. The greater the number of fetuses, the earlier the labor will occur. (The rough formula for due dates is to start at 40 weeks of gestation for one baby and subtract three weeks for each additional child: 37 for twins, 34 for triplets, etc. It’s remarkable, then, that eight fetuses were able to gestate for 30 weeks, as in the California case.) Labor can also occur if a sac ruptures and introduces bacteria into the uterus or if one of the fetuses isn’t growing correctly and signals the uterus to induce labor. (Scientists still don’t know exactly what causes labor to start.) But for safety reasons, multiple births are often carried out before labor naturally occurs, and almost always by cesarean section. If the uterus gets too big and the fetuses too heavy, it can be difficult for the woman to breathe. The amount of placental tissue can also cause the mother to develop pre-eclampsia, or pregnancy-related hypertension.
Don’t the babies get tangled up? Usually not. * Normally, each baby is enclosed in its own amniotic sac, which keeps the various umbilical cords and limbs from getting intertwined. Picture a bucketful of water balloons. In each sac, there’s plenty of fluid—about two-thirds the volume of the fetus—for the baby to move around in. After the sacs break, the babies can get tangled up during birth—so-called interlocking twins—which is why doctors usually opt for cesarean section. It is possible to have monoamniotic twins, or fetuses that share the same sac, with dangerous results: Cords can get compressed or entangled and cut off the babys’ oxygen and food supply.
Got a question about today’s news? Ask the Explainer.
Explainer thanks Joshua A. Copel of Yale University Medical School and Thomas Moore of University of California, San Diego.
Correction, Jan. 30, 2009: This article originally stated that fetuses in multiple births always have their own amniotic sacs. ( Return to the corrected sentence.)
The largest number of simultaneously born twins
But this, as they say, is not the limit. A greater number of twins have been born and are being born in the world. What is the largest number of children born at the same time?
Gears
In October 2008, 31-year-old Digna Carpio from New York gave birth to six twins - four boys and two girls.
The weight of babies at birth ranged from 0.68 to 0.9 kilograms. The happy mother and her husband, 36-year-old Victor, already had a seven-year-old son at that time.
The birth of six twins is extremely rare, occurring in one in 4.4 million people. Only once before in New York were born six babies at once. It happened in 1997.
In October 2010 in the Italian city of Benevento, near Naples, 30-year-old Carmela Oliva had six children - four girls and two boys. In Italy, this was the first such case in the last 14 years.
To help the babies to be born, doctors were forced to resort to caesarean section. Children were born with low weight - from 600 to 800 grams. According to doctors, this phenomenon is not associated with artificial insemination, but with the treatment that the mother underwent - the fact is that Italian laws prohibit transplanting more than three embryos.
Setuples
Bobbie McCaughey (USA) gave birth to 7 children on November 19, 1997.
They weighed between 1048 and 1474 grams and were born at 31 weeks pregnant within 16 minutes by caesarean section.
7 twins were born 8 weeks prematurely - on January 14, 1998 - to 40-year-old Hasna Mohammed Humair (Saudi Arabia). Among them, 4 boys and 3 girls, the smallest weighed 907 grams.
In August 2008, in the northern Egyptian province of Beheira, the 27-year-old wife of a local farmer, Ghazalu Khamis, gave birth to seven twins at once! As it turned out, the Egyptian dreamed of giving her husband a son and was taking pregnancy-stimulating drugs. The result is four sons and three daughters.
Ghazala Khamis was placed under observation two months before the birth: the development of twins in the mother's womb did not cause concern - the doctors were only worried about the increasing pressure on the kidneys. After a caesarean section, the woman in labor also underwent a blood transfusion. But all the crumbs were born healthy and quite large - from 1.4 to 2.
8 kg, which in itself is a mystery of nature.
Octopuses
On January 26, 2009, 33-year-old Nadia Suleman gave birth to eight twins, all of whom were healthy.
The mother of the newborn eight was then living with her other children and parents in the suburbs of Los Angeles - in the small town of Whittier. The family already grew up six kids aged two to seven years, among whom there is a pair of twins.
The children's grandmother left her job and devoted herself to her daughter's family. And grandfather, to help Nadia, went to Iraq to work under a contract. Nadia herself claimed that she decided to take this step because of her own childhood, in which she missed her brothers and sisters so much. In addition, the eccentric American said that she was following the example of her idol, the large Angelina Jolie. A few years ago, Suleman even had plastic surgery to look like an actress.
Eight was conceived through in vitro fertilization (IVF). Doctors in such cases insist on the reduction (removal) of a part of the embryos.
After all, such a number of them can adversely affect both the health of the mother and the health of future children.
But the Californian, having enlisted the support of her large family, refused the reduction. A single mother divorced her husband a long time ago precisely because they could not have children together.
Delivery by caesarean section was nine weeks premature. A team of 46 doctors who took birth was expecting the birth of seven babies, which, although not often, does happen. However, there were eight newborns - six boys and two girls - and they are all quite healthy. Baby weight - from 700 g to 1.9kg. Seven of them immediately breathed on their own and were bottle fed. The whole family was discharged from the maternity hospital home in just a week.
From 10 and more
There is information about the birth of ten twins at once. Such cases were recorded in Spain in 1924, in China in 1936 and in Brazil in 1946. But this is not the limit.
Eleven children at once - that's the largest number of twins known. The first birth of 11 twins occurred on 29May 1971 in the USA, in the city of Philadelphia. The second - in 1977 in Bangladesh, in the city of Bagarhat. In both cases, none of the children, unfortunately, survived.
In addition
The largest number of children born to one mother
The largest number of children born to one mother, according to official data, is 69. According to reports made in 1782, between 1725 and 1765. The wife of a Russian peasant Fyodor Vasiliev gave birth 27 times, giving birth to twins 16 times, triplets 7 times and 4 twins 4 times. Of these, only 2 children died in infancy.
Of our contemporaries, the most prolific mother is Leontina Albina from San Antonio, Chile, who gave birth to 55 children in 1943-81. As a result of the first 5 pregnancies, she gave birth to triplets, and exclusively male.
Woman with the most births
The record number of births, 38, is claimed to be Elizabeth Greenhill of Abbots Langley, Hertfordshire, UK.
She had 39 children - 32 daughters and 7 sons - and died in 1681.
The largest father in history
The largest father in history is the Russian peasant of the village of Vvedensky Yakov Kirillov, who in 1755 was presented to the court in connection with this (he was then 60 years old). The first wife of a peasant gave birth to 57 children: 4 times four, 7 times three, 9 times two, and 2 times one. The second wife gave birth to 15 children. Thus, Yakov Kirillov had 72 children from two wives.
Do you remember the story about the African woman who gave birth to 10 children? In fact, she wasn't even pregnant.0001
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Image copyright, Getty Images
Image caption,Babies were reported to have been born at Steve Biko Hospital, but authorities say there simply isn't room for it
A woman in South Africa who claimed to have given birth to 10 children and thus broke the world record, in fact, she was not even pregnant, authorities in the South African province of Gauteng said.
In early June, several media outlets, including the BBC, reported that 37-year-old Gosiame Tamara Sithole had given birth to tens in a Pretoria hospital by caesarean section.
After that, the regional authorities tried to establish what exactly happened, and reported the results of their investigation on Wednesday.
"Doctors have determined that Sithole has not given birth recently," the Gauteng administration said in a statement quoted by The South African. "In addition, it was determined that she had not recently been pregnant."
According to the South African site Times LIVE, local social workers were concerned about Sithole's mental state and sent her to the hospital on 18 June.
"Initially, she was supposed to stay in the hospital for 72 hours ... but in accordance with the mental health law, the doctors recommended that she be kept in the hospital for an additional seven days for observation," the Gauteng administration said.
According to the London newspaper i, the woman's lawyer said that she was being held in the hospital against her will and that he would go to court to demand her release.
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Some of the media that reported on Sithole's "pregnancy" published pictures of her with a big belly. There is no word yet on exactly how these pictures were taken.
According to i, Tebogo Tsotetsi's alleged father's family reported last week that "they did not see the tithe and relied on the words of his girlfriend who called to announce the birth."
Image copyright, EPA
Image caption,A new record was reported in May by Malian Halima Cisse with one of her nine newborns pictured
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"He tried several times to visit his girlfriend and the newborns, but she refused to reveal her whereabouts and the condition of the children," the report also said. "The family decided that as long as we had there will be no other information, we conclude that Tebogo Tsotetsi and Gosiame Sithole did not give birth to a dozen."
i cites a statement from the South African Ministry of Health, which also looked into the circumstances of the story. "The results of our preliminary investigation again confirmed that there was no tithe at the Steve Biko Hospital," the ministry said. birth of twins.
In addition, the authorities of Gauteng intend to sue the editor of the site Pretoria News Pieta Rampedi, who wrote about the "ten babies", and the media holding Independent Group, which owns the resource.
