Last week, 25-year-old Halima Cisse welcomed five girls and four boys via cesarean section in Morocco according to Dr. Fanta Siby, Mali’s minister of health and social development.
The mom and her newborns are “all doing well,” Siby said.
Cisse was first admitted to a hospital in Mali’s capital of Bamako, but was later transferred to a Moroccan clinic on March 30 after an ultrasound showed that she was expecting seven babies and needed special care.
The director of the facility where Cisse gave birth, Youssef Alaoui, informed the Moroccan state TV that they had been contacted by Malian doctors about the case a month and a half ago.
But what they were not expecting? A grand total of nine babies.
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Cisse gave birth prematurely at 30 weeks and is now in stable condition after experiencing heavy bleeding — for which she was given a blood transfusion. Following giving birth via a cesarean section, each of the nine babies weighed between 1.1 and 2.2 pounds, according to the AP.
Alaoui revealed that Cisse had not used any fertility treatments to his knowledge. However, Yacoub Khalaf, a professor of reproductive medicine at King’s College London, told the AP that “such births would be extraordinarily unlikely without fertility treatment,” and encouraged “more awareness worldwide about monitoring fertility treatments and about the risks and costs of having so many premature babies at one time.”
In addition to her newborns, Cisse also shares an older daughter with her husband, Adjudant Kader Arbym.
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“God gave us these children. He is the one to decide what will happen to them. I’m not worried about that,” Arby revealed to BBC Afrique.
“When the almighty does something, he knows why.”
The former record for most children delivered in a single birth to survive is held by U.S. citizen Nadya Suleman who gave birth to eight kids in 2009, according to the Guinness World Records.