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Financial Future Uncertain For Egyptian Septuplets

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The Associated Press

Published: August 27, 2008

ALEXANDRIA, Egypt - The 27-year-old woman and her husband already had three children - all girls. They badly wanted a boy, and she had not conceived in five years, so doctors gave her hormones.

The startling result was healthy septuplets, four boys and three girls, heralded by Egyptian doctors as a miracle. But debate persists about the ethics of fertility treatment in a nation where medical oversight is lax, incubators and neonatal respirators are rare, and many families face pressure to have a son.

In addition, Egypt faces concerns about overpopulation and cheap fertility drugs could lead to a wave of multiple births. President Hosni Mubarak warned in June that growth is hindering Egypt's economy, saying Egypt's population of 79 million, mostly crammed into the 3 percent of the country's area around the Nile River, will double by 2050.

For the mother, Ghazala Khamis, the most pressing question now is how her impoverished family is going to get by.

"I'm really scared," she said, lying in her hospital bed in this Mediterranean coastal city. "We live in a mud hut with only two rooms. I don't know how we're going to afford 10 children now."

Khamis' husband, Farag Mohammed Ali, a 31-year-old farm laborer, can find work only a few days a week, she said. "I'm really worried about what the future looks like."

Much about the Aug. 16 birth, by Caesarean section, was stunning. The babies are large for a multiple birth, weighing between 3 pounds 3 ounces and 4 pounds 10 ounces each. The duration of the pregnancy was also the longest ever for septuplets: 34 weeks.

By contrast, the world's first surviving septuplets, born to the McCaughey family in Iowa in 1997, came at 31 weeks and the biggest baby weighed about the same as Khamis' smallest. There are two other sets of surviving septuplets, both born to Saudi women.

Khamis' doctors waited so long to deliver the babies because Egypt has only a few respirators for newborns, and none were available. So for weeks, doctors kept Khamis in Alexandria's Shatby Maternity University Hospital, letting the fetuses develop enough that their lungs could function on their own after birth. But the wait also increased the risk to the mother.

"We were simply blessed by God that no complication happened ... If there had been a complication, Ghazala would have died," Mahmoud Meleis, the doctor who performed the Caesarean section, told The Associated Press.

After their birth, images on television showed the boys - Mohammad, Kareem, Bilal and Yassin - and girls - Israa, Habiba and Do'a - lying side-by-side in two makeshift incubators, oxygen hoods covering their heads. Four were then whisked by ambulance to two other hospitals because there were not enough incubators at Shatby.

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