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 on Wednesday last via C-section at the hospital in the capital Kampala where she had been receiving in vitro fertilization treatment, said Arthur Matsiko, spokesperson for the Women’s Hospital International Facilities Centre.
“She is healthy. She speaks. She walks around if they tell her to walk around the hospital,” Matsiko said of Namukwaya, who had given birth to a daughter in 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 “amazing achievement.”
The twins were born prematurely at 31 weeks’ 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.
Namukwaya is the oldest woman to give birth at the Kampala hospital, which specializes in helping couples struggling with fertility.
“In 70 years when I am considered weak, unable to conceive and give birth, or take care of a baby, and here is a miracle of the twins,” said the new mother to AFP.
Before she welcomed her first child three years ago, Namukwaya said she had been labeled in her rural community a “cursed woman” for not being able to conceive.
InternationalNamukwaya had her first child in her late sixties, also with the help of IVF treatment. Fertility Center and Women’s Hospital International
Her husband died in 1992, leaving her childless, and she met her current partner in 1996.
Namukwaya blasted her partner for not being able to visit her in hospital, speculating that it could be bad that she gave birth to twins.
“Men don’t like to be told you’re carrying more than one child. Ever since I was admitted here, my man has never appeared,” she lamented.
This is not the first time that a woman beyond the traditional childbearing age has become a mother. In 2019, a 73-year-old woman in southern India gave birth to twins after receiving IVF care.