A US woman has given birth to eight babies
A US woman has given birth to eight babies, becoming just the second person recorded in the US to have delivered a set of living octuplets.
The six boys and two girls, who were nine weeks premature, were delivered by caesarean section in the hospital in Los Angeles, California.
The babies, who weighed in at between 1.8lbs (820g) and 3.4lbs each, are all said to be doing well.
They were screaming and kicking around very vigorously, a doctor said.
The mother, whose identity has not been revealed, has asked that limited information be released about the births.
A hospital spokeswoman described the deliveries, which took place in the space of five minutes, as "truly amazing".
Three of the babies needed help breathing, but all were otherwise doing well, a doctor said.
The babies will be in incubators for at least six weeks and the mother is planning to breast feed them all, the hospital officials said.
The world's first live-born set of octuplets were delivered in Houston, Texas, in 1998. One baby died about a week later - but the surviving children celebrated their 10th birthday in December.
Their Nigerian-born mother, Nkem Chukwu, said the new parents had much to look forward to, the Associated Press agency reported.
"Just enjoy it. It's a blessing, truly a blessing," Mrs Chukwu was quoted as saying. "We'll keep praying for them."
Good luck to her, breastfeeding 8 babies :eek:
California octuplets' mom already has 6 kids
The California woman who astonished doctors earlier this week by giving birth to octuplets at a suburban Los Angeles hospital already has six other children, CBS News reported on Thursday.
The woman delivered six boys and two girls prematurely by Caesarean section on Monday, surprising doctors who had seen only seven babies in ultrasound images.
Officials at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in the Los Angeles suburb of Bellflower have declined to identify the mother or reveal if she received fertility treatments, which can increase the likelihood of multiple births.
There are no known cases of naturally conceived octuplets.
A Kaiser Permanente spokeswoman declined to comment on the CBS report but said that all eight babies were still in the hospital's neonatal intensive care unit and doing well.
Five of the babies were feeding and six were breathing on their own, hospital spokeswoman Nancy Tovar-Huxen said. She said doctors had not yet determined when they could go home.
In reporting on "The Early Show" that the mother already has six other children, a CBS reporter who visited the woman's Los Angeles-area home cited two unnamed acquaintances.
One of those acquaintances said that the mother lived with her parents and that two of her other children were twins.
The birth of the octuplets already has raised eyebrows, with fertility and reproductive experts saying that such high-risk pregnancies should be avoided.
"When we see something like this in the general fertility world, it gives us the heebie-jeebies," Michael Tucker, an Atlanta-based clinical embryologist and leading researcher in fertility treatments, told the Los Angeles Times.
"If a medical practitioner had anything to do with it, there's some degree of inappropriate medical therapy there," the Times quoted him as saying.
How is she going to manage with 14 children? Having already got six children, to have another eight at once seems irresponsible to me. I agree completely with what the embryologist says.
Octuplets' mum 'already has six'
A Californian woman who gave birth to octuplets earlier this week already has six children, US media have reported.
The eight babies were delivered nine weeks early by Caesarean section in a hospital near Los Angeles on Monday.
The mother has not been named, but US media are quoting family members as saying she already has six other children, including twins.
Doctors say the eight babies are making good progress and are expected to stay in hospital for several more weeks.
Although the babies' mother asked doctors to keep her details confidential, a family acquaintance gave clues to her identity to the American CBS channel.
Shortly afterwards, media camped outside a house in Whittier, near Los Angeles.
The Associated Press news agency spoke to a man identified as the babies' grandfather, who was with two children. The children said they were excited to have eight new siblings, AP reported.
The Los Angeles Times later carried an interview with a woman identified as the babies' grandmother, who said her daughter already had six young children and never expected the fertility treatment she had received would result in eight more babies.
She said that doctors had given her daughter the option of reducing the number of embryos, but she had declined.
"What do you suggest she should have done? She refused to have them killed. That is a very painful thing," she said.
She added that her daughter expected a big challenge raising 14 children. The woman's husband is expected to return to Iraq where he works as a contractor, the LA Times reported.
Officials at the Kaiser Permanente Medical Center, near Los Angeles, said the woman was already 12 weeks pregnant when she came to them. Despite media questioning, the hospital has declined to say whether the mother became pregnant through fertility treatments.
