A Malian Woman Has Given Birth to Nine Babies

A woman from Mali has given birth to nine babies, the country’s health ministry has said.

Ultrasound scans had previously detected seven foetuses, but Halima Cisse, 25, gave birth to the five girls and four boys via caesarean section at a hospital in Casablanca, Morocco after being transferred from a medical facility in Bamako, Mali’s capital.

Cisse and her nine children are all doing well, Mali’s minister of health and social development, Fanta Siby, said.

Nonuplets are extremely rare, and complications during and following birth often have tragic consequences. In the previous two documented births of nine babies at once – in Australia in 1971 and Malaysia in 1999 – none of the babies survived more than several hours.

American Nadya Suleman – dubbed Octomom by the US media – gave birth to eight babies in 2009, all of whom survived.

In a statement, Siby wished Cisse and her children good health, and thanked Malian President Bah Ndaw and the medical teams in Mali and Morocco, “whose professionalism is at the origin of the happy outcome of this pregnancy.”

According to BBC News, Cisse’s husband, Adjudant Kader Arby, is still in Mali with the couple’s older daughter.

"God gave us these children. He is the one to decide what will happen to them. I'm not worried about that. When the almighty does something, he knows why," he told BBC Afrique.