In an extremely rare case, 25-year-old Malian woman Halima Cisse gave birth to nine babies instead of the seven she expected on Tuesday, May 4, 2021. The two extra babies were quite a surprise, as doctors didn’t initially detect them in the ultrasounds. According to Reuters, on March 30, 2021, she was flown out of Mali and to Morocco in order to receive better medical care for her extremely rare situation.
Carrying septuplets is already an infrequent occurrence, and nonuplets are even more unlikely. However, Cisse gave successful birth via caesarian section, and all of the babies —five girls and four boys — are reported to have been successfully delivered and deemed healthy. The phenomenon wowed healthcare professionals, and for good reason.
Aside from all of the risk factors involved with birthing multiple children from one pregnancy, it’s isn’t very common to see. Cases of nonuplets have happened before, but unfortunately, not all of the babies were reported healthy after birth, nor did all of them survive. Cases of other multiple births are also not very common but more common than nonuplets. In fact, there was even a famous octuplet birthing in which the mom, Nadya Suleman, has ever since been dubbed as “Octomom” after she gave birth to her babies in January of 2009. Because Suleman used in vitro fertilization (IVF), her pregnancy was surrounded by high controversy. However, with Cisse, this has not been reported to have been the case.
Read on to learn more about this extraordinary birth and other cases of the rare scenario.
Be sure to reach the end of this article to see the full video
While some mothers have chosen IVF as a route to pregnancy, this was not reported to be the case for Cisse.
Cisse was expecting to have seven babies, but instead, she birthed a total of nine. According to Reuters, ultrasounds performed in both Mali and Morocco failed to detect the extra two babies in the womb. The 25-year-old Malian woman was flown out of her home country of Mali to Morocco in order to give birth via caesarian section.
According to Beaumont, multiple-baby pregnancies always come with high risks than single-baby ones. According to the organization, the higher the number of fetuses in the womb, the higher the chances for the babies to be born prematurely. The organization stated:
“More than 60 percent of twins and nearly all higher-order multiples are premature (born before 37 weeks).”
Other potential risks in multiple-baby pregnancies include anemia, miscarriage, congenital disabilities, abnormal amounts of amniotic fluid, gestational hypertension, twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome, postpartum hemorrhage, and caesarian section. The latter was precisely the case for Cisse.
Although the babies were born in Morocco and not Mali, Mali’s health minister, Fanta Siby, made a statement about the health of the babies and the mother. She said:
“The newborns (five girls and four boys) and the mother are all doing well.”
Siby also offered praise to the two countries working together to deliver the healthy babies as she congratulated “the medical teams of Mali and Morocco, whose professionalism is at the origin of the happy outcome of this pregnancy,” according to Al Jazeera.
