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Woman in Texas gives birth to sextuplets in under 10 minutes

An estimated one in 4.7 billion women will give birth to sextuplets

Olivia Petter
Sunday 17 March 2019 17:57 GMT
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(Getty Images/iStockphoto)

A woman in Houston, Texas has given birth to sextuplets, beating the odds to make her one in 4.7 billion.

Thelma Chiaka welcomed two sets of twin boys and one set of twin girls on Friday morning at The Woman’s Hospital of Texas.

All six babies were born between 4.50am and 4.59am with weights ranging from one pound, 12 ounces to two pounds, 14 ounces.

According to the hospital, each of the babies is in a stable condition and will continue to be supervised in the advanced neonatal intensive care unit.

The delivery team, led by Dr Ziad Haidar, Dr Sharmeel Khaira and Dr Israel Simchowitz, have said that Chiaka is doing well too.

While Chiaka has yet to name all of her children, the hospital revealed that she has named her two daughters Zina and Zuriel.

Because having sextuplets is so rare, cases often make headlines.

In 1968, a woman in Birmingham became the first to give birth to six babies at once on the NHS. There were 28 medical staff at the delivery.

Fast-forward to 1983 and Janet Walton also made history by giving birth to the world’s first all-female sextuplets in Liverpool.

Walton wrote about her experience of raising her children in her memoir, Six Little Miracles: The Heartwarming True Story of raising the World’s First Sextuplet Girls, which was published in 2015.

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