A woman, aged 25, gave birth to quintuplets in Chhattisgarh’s Surguja district on Saturday. In a rare case, home-maker Manita delivered the quintuplets while in the seventh month of her pregnancy.
The babies are all girls and have been kept in NICU due to their low-birth. The case is said to be the first-of-its-kind in India. For the ‘most premature’ quintuplets that they are, the hospital staff has nicknamed them ‘five-star’ babies.
The parents, Manita and Mahesh, are happy to have five baby girls and are praying for each child to survive.
The babies were born through normal delivery on Saturday at around 10am. The lowest birth weight of these babies is 1kg while the heaviest is 1.5kg. The babies are so small that they could fit in a common tray.
Despite being pre-mature quintuplets, all their body parts are fully developed. Considering that the babies were born between the sixth and the seventh month of pregnancy, the fetuses had a record of fully developed lungs, eyes, and brain which are barely develop in the second trimester.
In 2014, Manita had her first pre-mature child but lost her three months after birth.
Quintuplets are very rare and are known to occur naturally in one among 55,000,000 births. The first quintuplets ever known to survive were the Dionne sisters born in 1934 in Canada.
While the rarity can make news because of multiple births occurring naturally, last year this time around, a German woman gave birth to quadruplets at the age of 65. This one was, however, through artificial insemination.
The 65-year-old woman called Raunigk was already a mother of 13 and had been trying to conceive by artificial insemination for almost 1.5 years, when all her trials saw through the success.
Raunigk gave birth to her youngest daughter at the age of 55. While pregnancy over the age of 35 is risky, giving birth to a healthy baby at middle-age was nothing short of a miracle. In fact, it was the youngest daughter who had urged that her mother, who by then had seven grandchildren, give her a little sibling, and therefore Raunigk tried for yet another pregnancy.
Strangely enough, Raunigk’s pregnancy was not challenging for her. But she received some criticism on her pregnancy at that age. Dr. HolgerStepan, head of obstetrics at the University of Leipzig said that her decision was naturally an extreme move because a pregnancy over 45 is considered high-risk, let alone over 60. She also added that the body of a 65-year-old is certainly not programmed for a pregnancy, even for a single child.
The oldest mother ever to give birth was a woman who delivered just days before her 67th birthday, according to the Guinness World Records.
