Mexican woman pregnant with nine babies
Baku, April 28 (AZERTAC). A Mexican woman in the state of Coahuila, which borders Texas, is set to give birth to nine babies next month. She is being treated at a hospital in the state capital Saltillo.
Karla Vanessa Perez, whose age was not disclosed, underwent fertility treatment to achieve this pregnancy. If all goes well, she will be the first to successfully give birth to living nonuplets, the technical term for a nine-fetus pregnancy.
The successful delivery of nonuplets would be one of the highest multiple births ever recorded. There have been a few sets of nonuplets (nine) in which a few babies were born alive, though none lived longer than a few days.
So far, the record for the highest multiple pregnancy in which all the babies survived is being held by none other than Nadya Suleman, of La Habra, California, who has been grabbing headlines recently because of alleged child neglect and unsafe living conditions at her home.
The Suleman octuplets are the longest surviving octuplets in history; it might surprise readers to know, however, that another set of octuplets was born alive in 1998 to the Chukwu family in Texas, but one of the babies died after one week.
As with other big multiple pregnancies, these octuplets were born with the aid of fertility treatments. All weighed under two pounds at the time of birth. The first born, Ebuka, was delivered on December 8, fifteen weeks premature. The remainder 7 octuplets were born by Caesarean section on December 20, 13 weeks premature.
There have been cases of human pregnancies that started out with ten, eleven, twelve or fifteen fetuses, but no instances of live births. The pregnancies of the 10, 11 and 15 fetuses have all resulted from fertility medications and assisted reproductive technology. The human female is equipped to carry only “minor” multiple pregnancies, such as twins, triplets and to a much lesser extent, quadruplets. Such pregnancies do occur naturally and have been carried to term successfully.
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