Both parents have said that the nonuplets were conceived naturally. The four boys and five girls have been named: Mohammed, in honour of the king of Morocco, Bah, in honour of the former president of Mali, El Hadji, Oumar, Hawa, Adama, Fatouma Oumou and Kadidia.
A 25-year-old Malian woman has given birth to nine babies - two more than doctors had detected during scans. Halima Cissé gave birth to the nonuplets in Morocco. Mali's government flew her there for specialist care.
Halima Cisse, a young woman from the northern city of Timbuktu, gave birth to five girls and four boys in Casablanca in May 2021. A Malian mother who gave birth to nine babies in Morocco last year returned home with her infants.
A Russian woman named Valentina Vassilyeva and her husband Feodor Vassilyev are alleged to hold the record for the most children a couple has produced. She gave birth to a total of 69 children – sixteen pairs of twins, seven sets of triplets and four sets of quadruplets – between 1725 and 1765, a total of 27 births.
Very high-order multiple births
In 1997, the McCaughey septuplets, born in Des Moines, Iowa, became the first septuplets known to survive infancy. Multiple births of as many as eight babies have been born alive, the first surviving set on record goes to the Suleman octuplets, born in 2009 in Bellflower, California.
How many babies can fit inside a pregnant woman? There's no scientific limit, but the largest reported number of fetuses in one womb was 15.
The current holder of the Guinness record is American Nadya Suleman, who gave birth to eight premature but otherwise healthy children in 2009. Alaoui, the clinic director, told The AP that as far as he was aware Cisse had not used fertility treatments.
A Russian woman named Valentina Vassilyeva is known as being the woman who has given birth to the most children in one lifetime. We often see stories these days about a family that has got anywhere between 15 and 30 children, but nobody comes close to Vassilyeva.
In both cases, the children were conceived through IVF with donor eggs. The oldest verified mother to conceive naturally (listed currently as of 26 January 2017 in the Guinness Records) is Dawn Brooke (Guernsey); she conceived a son at the age of 59 in 1997.
John Zhang of the New Hope Fertility Center made headlines by announcing that a 49-year-old patient at his clinic had given birth to a baby conceived with her own egg, frozen when she was 48. Dr. Zhang's patient is now the oldest woman ever to have a biological child through in-vitro fertilization.
Mary Toft's explanation for her strange births was that, in April 1726, she had been working in a field and was startled by a rabbit. She, and another woman, ran after it, and but could not catch it. They also failed to catch another rabbit that they had chased.
The most fertile woman in history is alleged to be an 18th-century Russian peasant called Valentina Vassilyev. Between 1725 and 1765, she is recorded as giving birth to a total of 69 children – 67 of whom survived infancy. This included 16 pairs of twins, seven sets of triplets, and four sets of quadruplets.
The birth of nine children is an extremely rare phenomenon. Only two others were recorded so far, in Australia in 1971 and in Malaysia in 1999. But Cissé's is the the first example of nonuplets born alive.
Once an extremely rare phenomenon, fertility treatments have made multiple births slightly more common today. But conceiving sextuplets without the use of fertility treatments is extremely rare. In fact, the odds of giving birth to sextuplets spontaneously are one in 4.7 billion.
The man who is thought to have fathered the most children of all time is Moroccan Sultan Ismail Ibn Sharif (1645 to 1727) with a total of more than 1,000, according to Guinness World Records.
Halima Cisse set a Guinness World Record after she gave birth to nonuplets, which is nine babies being born at once.
While stories about women giving birth in their 50s, 60s, and even 70s make for good headlines, these pregnancies are usually accomplished with donor eggs and in vitro fertilization (IVF). There is no set oldest age when you can get pregnant naturally, but fertility starts to decline as you age.
Xinju Tian, who was 67 years old when she gave birth in 2023, set a new record for the oldest woman to give birth naturally.
Getting Pregnant After 50
While it's not impossible to become pregnant naturally at 50, it is very rare. Women are born with all of the eggs they will ever have. As you get older, you have fewer eggs, and they are more likely to have abnormalities. Most women who get pregnant after 50 use donor eggs.
Fertility rates in Asia
South Korea has the lowest fertility rate globally at 0.9 children per woman, closely followed by Puerto Rico at 1.0 and a trio of Malta, Singapore, and the Chinese Special Administrative Region Hong Kong all at 1.1 children per woman.
Most women know that they will get a period about once a month, but do not know much else about their monthly cycle. Some women still believe that they can get pregnant any day of the month. This is simply not true! A woman is only fertile (meaning she can get pregnant) between 5-7 days each cycle.
You're most fertile at the time of ovulation (when an egg is released from your ovaries), which usually occurs 12 to 14 days before your next period starts.
Women without children have also been found to have an increased risk of breast cancer, and increased mortality from uterine, ovarian and cervical cancer when compared to women with children. Moreover, the fertility declines with the advanced age at first childbearing.
Around 17.5% of the adult population – roughly 1 in 6 worldwide – experience infertility, showing the urgent need to increase access to affordable, high-quality fertility care for those in need.
Surrogacy is an arrangement where a person carries and gives birth to a baby for another person, for example, a couple who can't be pregnant themselves.