NONUPLETS

On 4 May 2021, 25-year old Halima Cisse (below with her husband Adjudant Kader Arby) of Mali (country in red) went to Morocco (green), thirty weeks (40 is the typical length) into her pregnance to bear nine babies (five girls and four boys)--nonuplets.  They weighed in from 1.1 to 2.2 pounds.  Not much has been reported since then, except that they all survived and are fragile.  Similar events happened in Sydney, Australia in 1971 and Malaysia in 1999.  However, none survived for more than a few days. 

Remember Octomom?  Nadya Suleman, now 45, celebrated the 12th birthday of her octuplets earlier this year.  She actually already had six children, all by in vitro fertilization.  The first of the six came in 2001 when she was 25-years old and divorced.  The third child is severely autistic.

The father has not been named.  All six boys and two girls are doing well in Los Angeles today:

How does she support her 14 children?

Nadya lives paycheck-to-paycheck and works as a full-time counselor with patients who have drug and alcohol addictions. She also lives off of the residuals she receives from her adult films. She’s managed to make ends meet with the help of government assistance, she told The New York Times in 2018. She also still participates in “international photo shoots” for cash. Additionally, she is busy working on a book that she started in graduate school, she told the outlet.

In 2017, Nadya admitted she is the sole provider for her family. “Help? I don’t get any help,” she told Inside Edition. “I haven’t had any help in many, many years.”

Although Nadya has tried to keep her kids out of the spotlight, RadarOnline reported she is open to a reality TV show. She’s “ready to make a comeback,” a source told the outlet. Aside from her day job, her first priority is to her children.

A video of the children at the age of 10.  A clip from last year.

Among the notable multiple births in history are:

• The Dione quintuplets of Canada, born on 29 April 1896, were the first to survive infancy, and were the only set of identical quintuplets to live into adulthood.  Here with their parents in 1947.

• 
  The Gosselin sextuplets, born on 10 May 2004 in Hershey, Pennsylvania to Jon and Kate Gosselin, who already had a set of twins, then three years old.  They had a reality television show titled Jon & Kate Plus 8.

• 
  The McGaughey septuplets born on 19 November 1997 in Des Moines, Iowa are the world's first surviving set of septuplets.
• There have been eight set of octuplets, but Octomom's happen to be the only who survived.

In 2009 Scientific American reported on a Tunisian teacher in her 30's who successfully delivered 12 infants.  Alas, the health ministry of the country exposed this as a fraud.

Then there is Feodor Vassilyev (above), a Russian peasant who lived from 1707 to 1782, who gave birth 27 times, and had 16 twins, seven triplets and four quadruplets, mother of 69, with 65 of them surviving their infancy.  Her husband, Feodor Wassilief was something special.  69 children with her and another 18 children with a second wife.

Guinness lists:

• The heaviest birth as 22 pounds. in Seville, Ohio on 19 January 1879.  Mother was Anna Bates (right) of Canada, who was 7 feet 11 inches tall, while the father was Martin Van Buren Bates, around 7 feet 10" tall.  Unfortunately, "Babe" lived only for 11 hours.
• Heaviest 
• Twins had a combined weight of 27 pounds 12 oz to Mary Ann Haskin of Fort Smith, Arkansas on 20 February 1924.
• Triplets weighed 24 pounds to Mary McDermott of the UK on 18 November 1914.
• Quadruplets weighed 22 lb 16 oz to Tina Saunders of the UK on 7 February 1989.

• 
  First test tube baby (in vitro fertilization) to Louise Brown of the UK on 25 July 1978 to Lesley  Brown.
• Most premature to Brenda and James Gill of Canada on 10 May 1987, 128 days early, weighing 1 lb 6 oz.  Normal pregnancy is 280 days.  Baby James survived well.

• 
  Shortest baby was Nisa Juarez of the U.S., born on 20 July 2002, measuring 9.44 inches long and weighing 11.3 ounces.
• Oldest person to give birth was almost 67 year old Maria del Carmen Bousada Lara (right) of Spain on 5 January 1940, who had twins.

Finally, the natural odds of septuplets (six) are one in 4 billion pregnancies.  As there are around 200 million pregnancies/year, this means there should be one every 20 years.  Most of these multi-births today are induced by some form of fertility treatment.

The chance of a natural octuplet birth is said to be around one in 21 trillion.  This actually happened in Mexico City in 1967.

There are 7.7 billion people today alive on Planet Earth.  It is estimated that 117 billion of us were born in all of history.  Don't know the odds of a natural nonuplet birth, but chances are with these tiny numbers, there has never been one of these ever, except for now, but only because of medical inducement, and the one from Halima Cisse is already the third.  More, and larger numbers, can be expected into the future as some seek fame.

Here is something to ponder over:  The odds of you being born were one in 400 trillion.  But then Ali Binazir did his calculation and placed the odds at 1 in 10 to the 2,685,000 power.  The fact that you are here is a miracle.

-