A Nigerian woman has stunned the world and the medical community this week by giving birth to twins – a boy, and a girl – at the age of 68.
According to CNN, last Tuesday, after three previous IVF attempts, Margaret Adenuga and her husband Noah Adenuga, 77 have finally been able to start a family. The couple, who were married in 1974, have desired to have a child of their own for decades and say they never gave up.
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“I am a dreamer, and I was convinced this particular dream of ours will come to pass,” Adenuga, a retired stock auditor told CNN.
The children were delivered via caesarian section at 37 weeks at the Lagos University Teaching Hospital (LUTH) but the facility chose to delay making the news public to give the first-time mother time to recuperate.
“As an elderly woman and a first-time mother, it was a high-risk pregnancy and also because she was going to have twins but we were able to manage her pregnancy to term,” explained Dr. Adeyemi Okunowo, who prior to delivering the babies assembled a specialist team at the hospital to monitor the pregnancy.
Last year, a 73-year-old woman in India was able to safely deliver twin girls after she conceived through IVF. But Okunowo warned that even though older women can conceive later in life through IVF, doctors must still be candid with their patients about the medical risks associated with making the choice to have a child when older.
“There are age-related medical complications that come with being pregnant at that age such as the baby being born preterm. She’s lucky but many may succumb to other complications during or after having a baby,” he said.
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