An Indian woman has welcomed five baby girls, a remarkable and extremely rare occurrence in the realm of childbirth. Quintuplets like this occur naturally in perhaps only one out of tens of millions of births.
Anita Kumari, aged 27, gave birth to the quintuplets at the Rajendra Institute of Medical Sciences in the eastern state of Jharkhand on a Monday.
The hospital shared this incredible news on Twitter along with a photo of the newborn babies.
“A woman from Chatar has given birth to five children at the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at RIMS. The babies are under the supervision of doctors in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. A successful delivery was conducted under the leadership of Dr. Shashi Bala Singh,” announced the hospital.
Medical professionals conducted an ultrasound and discovered that the woman was carrying five fetuses. She delivered naturally at just seven months into her pregnancy.
Dr. Rajiv Mishra, a professor in the Neonatology Department at the hospital, explained that three of the babies remained in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at the hospital, while two were transferred to another facility due to limited resources.
“The first, third, and fifth baby are with us. The first and third babies weigh 1.1 kilograms each, and the fifth one weighs 750 grams. They are premature babies, very tiny,” said Dr. Mishra. The other two babies weighed 900 grams each.
Dr. Kiran Shankar Das, an assistant professor in the Neonatal Department, added that the babies would require at least 45 days to two months of close monitoring.
“They were born at 27 weeks of gestation. One baby is on a ventilator, and the other two are stable. Their survival chances are 50 percent to 60 percent,” he noted.
While twins, triplets, quadruplets, and quintuplets have become more common with the use of in vitro fertilization (IVF), Dr. Das clarified that IVF was not involved in this case.
“The mother was on fertility treatment, she was on ovulation-inducing drugs, but not IVF,” he stated. “This is the first case of quintuplets being born in the hospital. We delivered quadruplets a few months back in the hospital.”
Naturally conceiving quintuplets is exceptionally rare, occurring in only about one in 55 million births. Nonetheless, there have been a few instances of such births in India.
In 2015, a woman in northern Punjab gave birth to five girls in just 10 minutes, and a 25-year-old woman in Jaipur in western Rajasthan delivered five babies, although one was stillborn.
