The sextuplets include five girls and a boy, who were born 24 weeks and six days of amenorrhea (absence of menstruation), making the births extremely premature. They were born via caesarian section and are currently being hospitalized in neonatal resuscitation. They will likely spend months in hospital care.
As a response to the rare birth amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic afflicting France, and the fragile state of the sextuplets, a medical source speaking to EN24 said “we are being very careful, this is a situation which requires all the technical expertise of the high-performance team at Hautepierre hospital.”
The natural birth of sextuplets is highly uncommon, occurring once for every 4.7 billion births. However, these are not the first French sextuplets - although the last time the country saw sextuplets was in 1988, in Normandy, northern France.
In April 2017, a women gave birth to a set of healthy, naturally conceived quadruplets at Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem. The mother said that when she was told after undergoing an ultrasound scan that she had quadruplets after being unable to conceive at all, she was in shock.