An elderly woman has been dubbed a “miracle” after she did the unthinkable – becoming a mother at the ripe age of 70.
Safina Namukwaya delivered twins, a boy and a girl, after receiving fertility treatment that has made her one of the world’s oldest new mothers.
The remarkable delivery happened at the Women’s Hospital International Facility Center in Kampala, Uganda on Wednesday.
“She’s healthy. She’s talking. She’s walking around if they tell her to walk around the hospital,” a spokesperson for the fertility clinic said, adding the bubs were born via C-section after Ms Namukwaya underwent in vitro fertilisation (IVF) treatment.
Ms Namukwaya used a donor egg and her partner’s sperm to conceive the twins, Dr. Edward Tamale Sali told BBC News, describing the babies’ arrival as an “extraordinary achievement”.
The twins were born prematurely at 31 weeks of gestation and placed in incubators, but are said to be in good health.
Ms Namukwaya is the oldest woman to deliver a baby at the Kampala hospital, which specialises in helping couples who struggle with fertility.
She previously welcomed a daughter at the same facility in 2020, when she was in her late 60s, following IVF treatment.
“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 mum said, according to a report by The New York Post.
Before she welcomed her first child three years ago, Ms Namukwaya said she had been labelled “cursed woman” for failing to get pregnant by the remote, rural community she lived in.
Her husband died in 1992, leaving her childless, and she met her current husband in 1996.
But in a bizarre twist, her partner was no where to be seen at the birth of their twins, with Ms Namukwaya blasting him partner for failing to visit her in the hospital.
“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.
In Australia, bulk billed IVF and IUI Treatment is only available to women who are 45 years of age or younger at the time of egg collection.
Women older than that age can potentially access private treatment, but it is dependant on the clinic and doctor performing the procedure.
Generally, after the age of 45, it becomes difficult to access the fertility treatment, with most clinics refusing it past the age of 50.
However, elsewhere in the world, some physicians are prepared to perform the treatment, resulting in rare cases of women way past traditional child-bearing ages has becoming mums. After 73-year-old woman in southern India gave birth to twin girls after getting IVF care in 2019, medical experts shared concerns over the treatment.
Fertility specialist Sunil Jindal raised questions about the future of a child born to elderly parents, as well as health issues for the mother.
“There are ethical issues. In my opinion it is unfair to do such a procedure on a woman who is over 60,” Jindal told AFP at the time.
“The sheer fact that a woman in her 70s has to carry the weight of a child in her womb for nine months is stressful.
“Then the question comes how are the parents going to look after the baby? That is also quite a task.”