70-year-old Ugandan woman gives birth to twins

Publish date: 2024-06-26

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A 70-year-old woman in Uganda has given birth to twins after receiving fertility treatment that made her one of the world’s oldest new mothers.

Safina Namukwaya delivered a boy and a girl Wednesday via C-section at the hospital in the capital Kampala where she had been receiving in vitro fertilization treatment, said Arthur Matsiko, spokesman for the Women’s Hospital International Facility Center.

“She’s healthy. She’s talking. She’s walking around if they tell her to walk around the hospital,” Matsiko said of Namukwaya, who had given birth to a daughter at the same facility in 2020, when she was in her late 60s, following IVF treatment.

Namukwaya used a donor egg and her partner’s sperm to conceive the twins, Dr. Edward Tamale Sali told BBC News, touting the babies’ arrival as an “extraordinary achievement.”

The twins were born prematurely at 31 weeks of gestation and placed in incubators, but were said to be in good health.

Despite being born prematurely, the twins are said to be in good health. Bukedde 1

Namukwaya is the oldest woman to deliver a baby at the Kampala hospital, which specializes in helping couples who struggle with fertility.

“At 70 years when I’m considered weak, unable to get pregnant and deliver, or look after a baby, and here is a miracle of the twins,” the new mom told AFP.

Before she welcomed her first child three years ago, Namukwaya said she had been labeled in her rural community a “cursed woman” for failing to get pregnant.

Namukwaya was receiving in vitro fertilization treatment with a donor egg and her partner’s sperm. Women's Hospital International and Fertility Centre
Namukwaya had her first child in her late sixties, also with the help of IVF treatment. Women's Hospital International and Fertility Centre

Her husband died in 1992, leaving her childless, and she met her current partner in 1996.

Namukwaya blasted her partner for failing to visit her in the hospital, speculating that he might be miffed that she delivered twins.

“Men don’t like to be told that you are carrying more than one child. Ever since I was admitted here, my man has never showed up,” she lamented.

This is not the first time that a woman beyond the traditional child-bearing age has become a mom. In 2019, a 73-year-old woman in southern India gave birth to twin girls after getting IVF care.

With Post wires

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