A 25-year-old Mali woman has given birth to 9 babies at once — after expecting seven, according to Mali’s Minister of Health and the Moroccan clinic where the nonuplets were born.
Halima Cisse gave birth to the nonuplets in Morocco.
It appears to be the first time on record that a woman had given birth to nine surviving babies at once.
The nonuplets including five girls and four boys, and their mother, “are all doing well,” Mali’s health minister in a statement said.
Halima gave birth to the babies by cesarean section on Tuesday in Morocco after being sent there for special care by the Mali government.
Some of the babies wiggling their hands and feet inside incubators Wednesday in the private Ain Borja clinic in Casablanca.
Cisse had been expecting seven babies. Malian doctors, under government orders, sent her to Morocco for births and better treatment.
A woman who had eight babies in the US in 2009 holds the Guinness World Record for the most children delivered at a single birth to survive.
Two sets of nonuplets have previously been recorded – one born to a woman in Australia in 1971 and another to a woman in Malaysia in 1999 – but none of the babies survived more than a few days.
World record holder Nadya Suleman’s octuplets have grown up and are now 12 years old. She conceived them through in vitro fertilization.
