On Monday morning, a California woman gave birth to octuplets by Caesarean section in a hospital near Los Angles. Doctors at the Kaiser Permanente Bellflower Medical Center in South California stated the children are doing very well and they don’t need breathing support anymore. Initially, the condition of two of the babies was weak; they needed breathing support for the first hours after birth.

 

The babies will remain in the hospital for the next six weeks. The mother plans to breast-feed them all, hospital officials have said.

This is the second time in U.S. history when octuplets are born. According to reports, the last baby came five minutes after the first was born. The largest set of babies in which all babies survived more than a few days is septuplets. The first case of septuplets was registered in 1997.

The first set of octuplets was born in Houston, Texas, in 1998, six girls and two boys. One baby died days after birth because of heart and lung failure.

 

Infertility experts say the chances that these babies were conceived naturally are small. Human multiple births usually occur as the result of infertility treatments such as IVF or fertility drugs, which can cause multiple eggs to mature in one ovulatory cycle. According to statistics, mothers over 35 are more likely to have multiples than younger women. Experts say that babies born from multiple-birth pregnancies are more likely to be born prematurely than those from single pregnancies.