KARACHI: A middle-aged woman who had been childless for 16 years gave birth to quintuplets, four girls and a boy, at a hospital in North Nazimabad, announced officials of the hospital on Wednesday.

A female quintuplet was stillborn (dead at birth) while the other four babies and the mother had been kept at the intensive care unit where all the five were reportedly stable, said the officials.

“I am extremely happy,” said Zahir Khan, the father, a medicine distributor by profession. “Few people could realise how it feels when someone becomes a parent after remaining issueless for 16 years.”

“We kept visiting doctors in Quetta since our marriage and we were optimistic that we would definitely see our children sometime,” he added.

“After the way I have been blessed with the children and the treatment I have received at the hands of medical professionals here, I will love to see all my children joining the same profession,” said Mr Khan.

The officials said the family had arrived in Karachi from Quetta late last month and they admitted the women on Aug 26.

Sources in the hospital said the woman had been scanned through ultrasound many times and each time it showed she was pregnant with four children. The presence of fifth child was known only after the delivery.

They said that foreseeable complications in pregnancy forced the doctors to go for Caesarean section delivery in the 30th week. And then they knew about the stillborn baby girl – the fifth quintuplet.

A woman from Malakand district had also given birth to quintuplets — three baby girls and two boys — in Peshawar in October last year.

The same year in July, a woman in a hospital in Sialkot gave birth to four sons and a daughter.

Experts said the number of multiple births had increased quite considerably in Pakistan like elsewhere in the world and attribute the increase mainly to the impact of fertility treatments, such as in-vitro fertilisation.

Published in Dawn, September 18th, 2014