VIJAYAWADA: A 74-year-old woman gave birth to twins in Guntur on Thursday. Doctors performed a caesarean on Y. Mangayamma, who gave birth to two baby girls. The twins and the mother are doing well.
Mangayamma, who was post menopausal, wanted to have children and finally realised her desire through in vitro fertilisation (IVF). Mangayamma resident of Nelaparthipadu of East Godavari district married Y. Seetarama Raja Rao in 1962 but the couple couldn’t have children. In November 2018, they consulted IVF specialist Dr S. Umasankar at Ahalya Hospital in Guntur.
The egg was obtained from a donor and fertilised with the sperm of her husband Raja Rao through IVF. She became pregnant in January this year. Her condition was constantly monitored by keeping her in the hospital.
Dr Umasankar said this is the first and rare case of such an elderly woman becoming pregnant and giving birth to twins, setting a new record in India and surpassing the record of Daljindar Kaur of Rajasthan who gave birth to a baby boy on April 19, 2016 at the age of 72.
The twins.
The 80-year-old father of the new-borns and relatives came to the hospital and expressed happiness at the birth of the twins.
Raja Rao said they had tried for 57 years to have children. He said his wife was called godrallu (barren woman) and no one would invite them for various programmes, treating the childless couple as inauspicious.
He said when Mangayamma came to know about a woman turning pregnant at the age of 54, they decided to go in for IVF and consulted Dr Umasankar who started treatment in November last year. Dr Umashankar said that Mangayamma had no complications like diabetes and hypertension and was keen to give birth to a child so the treatment went well. He said that she had visited several hospitals in AP and Tamil Nadu but was not successful. His hospital had been very positive about the case, which yielded good results and created a new record. Mangayamma had no problem delivering the babies even at her advanced age, but she cannot obviously breast-feed the babies and so arrangements have been made to obtain the milk from a milk bank.
