Safina Namukwaya, a 70-year-old woman from Uganda recently defied commonly held perceptions to give birth to twins at a fertility centre in the capital city of Kampala, Ugandan media reported.
The 70-year-old gave birth to a boy and a girl through a caesarean section, the BBC reported.
The Women’s Hospital International Fertility Centre also confirmed the birth on their Facebook page.
Namukwaya delivered the children on Wednesday, November 29, according to NTV, and was helped along her journey by fertility specialist Dr Edward Sali.
Sali also performed the In Vitro Fertilisation (IVF) treatment on Namukwaya, which was how the fetuses were conceived.
Sali is a fertility specialist at the Women's Hospital International and Fertility Centre (WHI&FC), the facility where Namukwaya gave birth under careful medical care.
Sali told NTV that physical fitness was a major factor when giving birth at such a late stage in life.
Namukwaya was taken care of financially by Dr Sali throughout the process of the pregnancy, as she required constant medical attention due to her age of 70 years old.
She said that the decision to fall pregnant at the age of 70 stemmed from an incident in her community when she was insulted for not having children.
She lost her husband in 1992 and four years later, found a partner, but still yearned for her own children.
“I cared for other people's children and they would grow up and leave me alone. I wondered who would care for me after I became very elderly.
“One time a very young boy had a misunderstanding and heckled at me saying I was cursed by my mother to die without a child,” Namukwaya said during the NTV broadcast.
Dr Sali said he decided to deliver the babies by caesarean section at 31 weeks and place them in incubators because complications were more likely to occur during the late stages of pregnancy.
It is Namukwaya’s second birth in a space of three years; she also gave birth to a baby girl in 2020 through a similar process of IVF.
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