Couple's 17-Year Fertility Struggle Ends With Sextuplets

A couple who spent 17 years trying to conceive finally managed the feat—six times over. A Virginia hospital says sextuplets born May 11 to Ajibola Taiwo, a native of Nigeria, are "thriving." The three boys and three girls were born via C-section, and weigh between 1 pound, 10 ounces, and 2 pounds, 15 ounces, each. It's the first set of sextuplets born at Richmond's VCU Medical Center, which employed a 40-person team in the birth. And it wasn't just an extremely rare occurrence for the hospital: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention logged only 24 births involving quintuplets or more among the US' almost 4 million live births in 2015, reports the AP.

The Times-Dispatch reports Taiwo was 30 weeks and 2 days along at delivery and was released after a week in the hospital. "I hope for the smallest of my six children to grow up and say, 'I was so small, and look at me now,'" she says. A hospital press release explains that four heartbeats appeared during the couple's first ultrasound in November; it wasn't until January that they learned the four heartbeats were actually six. (This birth story garnered extensive press coverage this month, but for tragic reasons.)