In Rare Case, Woman In Jharkhand Gives Birth To 5 Babies

In a rare case, a woman in Jharkhand gave birth to five children at the Rajendra Institute of Medical Sciences (RIMS) in Ranchi on Monday. All five babies and the mother are said to be in healthy condition. The babies are underweight and have been kept in the Neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) for observation.

After the successful delivery, RIMS Ranchi shared the happy news and posted a photo of the newborns on its Twitter handle. Notably, it is the first time in the hospital's history that quintuplets have been delivered.

The tweet read, "A woman from Chatar has given birth to five children at the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at RIMS. The babies are under the supervision of doctors in the NICU. A successful delivery was conducted under the leadership of Dr. Shashi Bala Singh."

Five children born at once are known as quintuplets, and the odds of conceiving them are 1 in 55,000,000 births. Most quintuplets are a combination of boys and girls, all-male or all-female quintuples are rare. 

Though rare, multiple births have become more common in recent years because more people are using fertility drugs and procedures, such as IVF, to help conceive a baby. There are two main ways that a multiple pregnancy can happen, as per the Cleveland Clinic . The first is when one fertilized egg splits before it implants in the uterine lining. The second is when two or more separate eggs are fertilized by different sperm at the same time.

In February this year, Polish-British parents of seven also welcomed quintuplets. The babies were delivered by cesarean section at 29 weeks and still require respiratory support.

The most famous set of quintuplets is the Dionne quintuplets born in Canada in 1934. They were the first documented set of all identical quintuplets to survive infancy, as per Britannica.