GERMANY: German woman gives birth to sextuplets

Record ID: 335040

  • Title: GERMANY: German woman gives birth to sextuplets
  • Date: 21st October 2008
  • Summary: (L!1) BERLIN, GERMANY (OCTOBER 20, 2008) (REUTERS) EXTERIOR OF 'CHARITE' HOSPITAL SIGN FOR 'CHARITE' CHARITE HOSPITAL DOCTORS IN NEWS CONFERENCE PHOTOGRAPHER (SOUNDBITE) (German) ULRICH FREI , MEDICAL DIRECTOR OF 'CHARITE' HOSPITAL, SAYING: "We are talking about four girls and two boys, weighing between 800 and 900 grammes in the 27th week of pregnancy." VARIOUS OF JOURNA
  • Embargoed: 5th November 2008 12:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Germany
  • Country: Germany
  • Topics: Health,Light / Amusing / Unusual / Quirky
  • Reuters ID: LVA7UEX5AKIO1FKGTHB6U0RL8GK
  • Story Text: A woman in Berlin who wanted one baby gives birth to six instead.
    A woman who had been struggling to conceive ended up giving birth to six healthy babies in a German hospital, the medical director of Berlin's Charite hospital said on Monday (October 20).
    Ulrich Frei said the woman had given birth to four boys and two girls - each weighing between 800 and 900 grams (about 2 pounds) - after 27 weeks of gestation on Thursday (October 16). But he refused to provide details about the delivery.

    "It was an unproblematic caesarean birth," Wolfgang Henrich, a doctor who assisted the delivery, told a news conference. "As far as I have been able to find out from the State Bureau for Statistics, there have only been five sextuplets between 1958 and 1998. I don't know if the figures are accurate, but there were nevertheless several during these forty years, then there wasn't for a long time, and it is of course extremely rare because such pregnancies are highly complicated."
    The woman had undergone a standard fertility treatment after unsuccessful attempts to become pregnant, he said.
    Charite, one of Germany's leading hospitals, is 300 years old and Frei said sextuplets had never been born there before. The odds of having sextuplets is one in four billion, according to media reports.
    In Germany, the survival rate of infants weighing less than 1000 grams at birth is nearly 90 percent, according to Monika Berns -- director of the hospital's neonatology department.
    In August, an Iraqi woman gave birth to sextuplets, but two of them died at birth due to the hospital's lack of proper medical equipment. The first sextuplets known to survive their infancy were born to a South African couple in January 1974.
  • Copyright Holder: REUTERS
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