Childless for 17 years, couple now discovering the joy of six
For 17 years, Ajibola and Adeboye Taiwo tried to have a child but had no luck. Until now — times six. Ajibola Taiwo gave birth to sextuplets earlier this month at a Richmond, Va., hospital, and doctors said the three boys and three girls, along with their mother, are doing well. It’s the first time sextuplets have been born at VCU Medical Center, officials said.
On Thursday, the babies were still in the hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit. Their mother was released last week and is “very involved” in the babies’ care, hospital spokesperson Shira Pollard said.
The babies were born at 8:26 a.m. May 11 with the help of a 40-person medical team. Ajibola gave birth at roughly 30 weeks and delivered by caesarean section, officials said.
The babies range in size from one pound 10 ounces to two pounds 15 ounces. In a statement, officials said they “are doing well and continue to thrive.” Pollard said the medical team treating them hasn’t revealed when they will be discharged from the hospital. She said the parents and doctors aren’t talking with the media at this time.
In a statement, Ajibola said she hoped “for the smallest of my six children to grow up and say, ‘I was so small, and look at me now.’ ”
The hospital released photos of the newborns and their smiling parents. In one, Ajibola and Adeboye are holding two of their babies against their chests as they practise what hospital officials called “kangaroo care,” or skin-to-skin contact.
The couple, natives of western Nigeria, had tried to conceive a child for nearly two decades. They were described as being “overcome with joy when they saw four heartbeats” at their first ultrasound in November, officials said. But no one realized until January during another doctor’s appointment that the couple would be having two more.
“I was excited,” Adeboye Taiwo said in a statement from the hospital. “For the first time, we were expecting.”
Sextuplets are rare. In 2015, there were roughly four million live births in the U.S., and 24 of those were quintuplets or higher-order births, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.