Six more kids…
A 31-year-old Mexican woman has given birth to sextuplets, just twelve years after she had quadruplets.
Salud Romero, a housewife, more than doubled the size of her brood on Thursday, with four girls and two boys born by Caesarean section.
The babies, who weigh a tiny 590 and 870 grams (one and a quarter to two pounds each) each, are in incubators and their condition is “delicate”.
They are said to measure just 30 centimetres long.
Dad Joshua Salinas, 21, a labourer who earns between €72 and €114 a month, admitted they had not even got round to thinking about names for the youngsters.
He said: “I feel very happy but also worried about their health and how we’re going to cope financially.
“We thought Salud was going to give birth to five children so the sixth caught us by surprise.
“We haven’t even thought of names for them yet. I’ll talk with Salud about that when the children are out of danger.”
Doctors decided to deliver the babies when Salud was just 27 weeks pregnant because of her anaemia and an internal bleed, the Irish Examiner reports.
Rosalba Martinez, a neo- natal specialist at the Women’s Hospital in Morelia, 200 miles west of the capital Mexico City, where the babies are under constant observation in intensive care, said: “The outlook for them is not great but we have the staff and tools we need here to do the best we can.”
Hospital director Yara Pineda added: “Their health is delicate because they are underweight, because of their lack of pulmonary development and because of all the complications associated with artificial respiration.”
Mum-of-nine Ms Romero gave birth to quadruplets 12 years ago.
Unfortunately just two of the children, fathered by a previous partner, survived and she went on to have another child with her current partner.
The world’s last set of sextuplets was born in Oct 2008 in the New York borough of Queens, delivered by Caesarean section during mum Digna Carpio’s 25th week of pregnancy.
The Suleman octuplets, born in California in Jan 2009, are the longest-living octuplets in known history.
