Oh, babies! Woman from Mali gives birth to 9 in Morocco

BAMAKO, Mali — A 25-year-old woman from Mali may have set a record Tuesday as she delivered nine babies that survived at a Moroccan clinic, The Associated Press reported.

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Halima Cissé had been expecting seven babies, but ultrasound sessions failed to detect two other babies, have seven newborns, NPR reported.

The five girls and four boys -- nonuplets -- and their mother, “are all doing well,” Mali’s health minister, Fanta Siby, said in a statement.

Cissé gave birth prematurely at 30 weeks by cesarean section in Morocco, the AP reported. She was sent there for special care, according to Siby.

The newborns weighed between 500 grams and 1 kilogram (about 1.1 to 2.2 pounds), Youssef Alaoui, the Casablanca clinic’s director, told journalists in Morocco. The children will be kept in incubators for the next two to three months, Alaoui said.

“I’m very happy,” Cissé’s husband, Adjudant Kader Arby, told the BBC. “My wife and the babies are doing well.”

“Everybody called me. Everybody called,” Arby told NPR. “The Malian authorities called expressing their joy. I thank them. ... Even the president called me.”

Cissé was in stable condition after heavy bleeding for which she was given a blood transfusion, Alaoui told Moroccan state TV.

According to Guinness World Records, the current official record for the most babies delivered at one time to survive is eight. That was achieved on Jan. 26, 2009, when Nadya Suleman gave birth to six boys and two girls at the Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Bellflower, California. Suleman was nicknamed “Octomom” after the births. The children were conceived by in vitro fertilization, according to Guinness.

Guinness told the AP it would investigate to verify the births.

Two sets of nonuplets have been born, but none of them survived more than a few days, the BBC reported. One set was born in 1971 in Australia, while the other set was born in Malaysia in 1999.

It has not been revealed whether Cissé's pregnancy resulted from fertility treatments as Suleman’s did. Alaoui told the AP that he does not know about her receiving those kinds of treatments.

Cox Media Group