World’s most fertile woman with 44 children
Mariam Nabatanzi was just 13 when she became her first set of twins.
By the time she was just 36 Mariam had given birth to another 42 babies, which she is having to raise alone after her husband walked out on the giant family.
Now 41, Mariam has been told she suffers from a rare genetic condition, which means she kept having multiple births – despite begging doctors for help when she was just 23.
Mariam has three sets of quadruplets, four sets of triplets and six sets of twins and incredibly manages to care for and feed them all on her own.
The fertile mum was just 12 when she was married to her husband, who at 40 was 28 years her senior.
Just a year later she gave birth to her first set of twins.
Now, she and all of her kids have no choice but to live in appallingly cramped conditions in just four tiny homes made from cement bricks and a corrugated iron roof.
Mariam, from Uganda, and her brood live surrounded by coffee fields.
A doctor warned the mother that birth control, like the Pill, could cause her problems because she had unusually large ovaries.
So after her first set of twins, the babies just kept coming.
Ugandan families are often large with women having 5.6 children on average.
This is one of the highest birth rates in Africa but even by these standards, Mariam’s family is enormous.
At just 23, Mariam had 25 children and desperately begged her doctor for help to stop her from having any more.
But once again the medical advice was that she should keep getting pregnant because her ovary count was so high.
Mariam’s final pregnancy three years ago ended in tragedy when she gave birth to her sixth set of twins.
One of the babies died while she was in labour and then her husband, who would often leave for weeks on end, left her for good.
His name is now cursed in her family.
Mariam said: “I have grown up in tears, my man has passed me through a lot of suffering.
“All my time has been spent looking after my children and working to earn some money.”
But it was also after this birth that the mum finally got the medical help she needed to stop her having more babies.
Dr Charles Kiggundu, a gynaecologist at Mulago Hospital in Kampala, Uganda, said: “Her case is a genetic predisposition to hyper-ovulate, which is releasing multiple eggs in one cycle, which significantly increases the chance of having multiples; it is always genetic.”
