Many women who give birth to twins or more usually undergo a cesarean section. However, a 49-year-old Nigerian woman gave birth to sextuplets, four girls and two boys, naturally. This came six years after she had twins.
According to BBC Pidgin, Deaconess Doris Levi Wilson, from Bayelsa state in the south of Nigeria, waited 21 years after she got married to give birth to her twins, a boy, and a girl.
Doris and her husband, Levi Wilson, married in 1994. For so many years, they tried to conceive, but to no avail. They roamed from hospital to hospital across the country experimenting with all sorts of medications that did not give them the desired results.
Doris eventually resorted to local treatments including ingesting concoctions made with herbs and spices. She believes the local treatments helped her conceive the twins, Peremobowei Prince and Peremoboere Princess in 2015. She subsequently underwent similar treatments for the sextuplets: Miracle, Mercy, Merit, Marvis, Marvellous and Mirabel. She welcomed them on February 9 this year.
Up until the day she delivered the sextuplets, Doris had no idea she was carrying six babies in her womb because she did not have any scans taken. The women at the facility who massaged her as part of her local treatments played guesswork with the number of babies till the day she delivered and realized they were six.
Levi was very supportive throughout the treatments and was elated when the first set of twins and the sextuplets were born. He told reporters that it’s crucial that men get tested for fertility as well as women because the difficulties surrounding childbirth could also mean the man needs treatments as well.
Doris, who is now a mother of eight, said she waited a long time to conceive, and even though she is almost 50 years, she is open to having more babies.
