A 70-year-old Ugandan woman, Safina Namukwaya, has delivered a set of twins – a boy and a girl, after becoming pregnant through an In vitro fertilisation treatment, BBC reports on Thursday.
Namukwaya reportedly went through a successful caesarean delivery on Wednesday at the Women’s Hospital International and Fertility Centre in the Ugandan capital, Kampala.
“This is [an] extraordinary achievement, delivering twins to Africa’s oldest mother at 70 years,” Doctor Edward Tamale Sali, who supervised her pregnancy and delivery, told AFP.
He said the mother and babies — a boy and a girl — were still in the care of the Women’s Hospital International and Fertility Centre that he founded, but were in good health.
“There is no way to express my joy at this moment,” said Namukwaya, who lives in the rural of Masaka about 120 kilometres (75 miles) west of Kampala.
“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,” she told AFP by phone.
Namukwaya said she previously gave birth to a girl in 2020, after being mocked as “cursed woman” who had previously failed to produce a child.
She said her first husband had died in 1992, leaving her without children, and she met her current partner in 1996.