This is how you make your haters your motivators, African-style: After being mocked for being childless, a Ugandan woman just gave birth to fraternal twins at the age of 70. Three years ago, she also had a daughter at 67.
“God is in charge,” the mother, Safina Namukwaya, said through a translator. “You see, you can have one child and feel overwhelmed. But here I am with twins at a time I am weak … I don’t know, but they say every child comes with their blessings.”
Aided by in-vitro fertilization (IVF) treatment, Namukwaya had a boy and a girl on Nov. 29 via cesarean section, according to the Women’s Hospital International and Fertility Centre in Kampala, Uganda, which announced the births on its Facebook page. The hospital is calling her “Africa’s oldest mother,” after she was impregnated with a donor egg and her partner’s sperm.
The twins were born prematurely, each weighing 3 pounds, 7 ounces, after 31 weeks, and were placed in incubators. The average term is 40 weeks.
She isn’t the world’s oldest septuagenarian to become a mother; merely its most recent. A 73-year-old Indian woman also had twins in 2019, also after IVF treatment.
Dr. Edward Tamale Sali, a specialist at the hospital, said the Namukwaya babies are in stable condition.
Her pregnancy was made all the more difficult by the unidentified father, whom she called “my man” and who left her when he learned she was having twins, she said.
“Men don’t like to hear that you are going to have more than one child,” Namukwaya said. “Even after I was admitted, my man never showed up.”
