Rawalpindi: Pakistani woman gives birth to 6 babies in rare case
The woman named Zeenat Waheed delivered the six babies one after another within an hour.
A 27-year-old woman gave birth to six children at the District Headquarters Hospital in Pakistan's Rawalpindi on Friday, reported Dawn. Four of the newborns are boys, while two are girls, each weighing less than two pounds. All six babies and their mother are healthy, the hospital’s medical superintendent, Dr Farzana said.
The report said the woman, Zeenat Waheed, the wife of Mohammad Waheed, delivered the six babies one after another within an hour. It was Zeenat’s first childbirth. She suffered labour pain on Thursday night and was brought to the hospital.
“The sextuplets and their mother are in good condition; the doctors have however put the babies in an incubator,” Dr Farzana told Dawn.
Dr Farzana informed that Zeenat developed complications after delivering the babies and her condition is expected to normalise in the next few days.
In the delivery sequence, the first two babies to be born were boys. “It was not a normal delivery and in the delivery sequence, the baby girl was third,” said the duty officer in the labour room.
Meanwhile, in an interaction with the media, family members of Zeenat expressed happiness over the birth of the babies.
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How multiple pregnancy may happen
Birth of sextuplets is believed to occur in just one in every 4.5 million pregnancies. Live births of such a high number of babies are a rare occurrence.
A woman may get pregnant with two or more fetuses at the same time when a fertilized egg splits before it implants in the uterus (happens in the case of identical twins) or when separate eggs are fertilized by different sperm (making fraternal twins).
In recent years, reproductive technologies such as ovulation-stimulating medicines and In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) have been known to cause multiple pregancies. Ovulation-stimulating medicines help produce many eggs. If fertilized, they can result in multiple babies, according to Stanford Medicine.