South African Woman Allegedly Gives Birth to Decuplets
Latest update: On the same Tuesday that the Tsotetsi family gave their statement, Gosiame Thamara Sithole said they were lying about her. She has insisted that the decuplets were born and that the Tsotetsi's want to gain financially by using them.
Update: The Tsotetsi family released a statement on June 15, 2021, confessing that they hadn't seen the decuplets and weren't sure of their birth. Sithole is also currently missing.
A South African woman might’ve broken the Guinness World Record after she gave birth to ten children! The current record holder had also given birth in Africa, but she had one less child.
This month, Gauteng resident Gosiame Thamara Sithole, 37, reportedly gave birth to ten children! Initially, doctors had detected that the woman would be giving birth to only eight children, according to medical scans.
The decuplets were reported to have arrived safely on June 7, 2021, at a hospital in Pretoria, South Africa. Sithole had given birth via Caesarean section to three girls and seven boys, as per the family.
A doctor wearing blue scrubs with his hands folded at a hospital | Photo: Pixabay/Free-Photos
She’s set to beat Mali’s Halima Cissé’s Guinness World Record that was created last month. Cissé, 25, won’t hold the record for most children born for long as she’d only given birth to nine children.
The alleged decuplets have made Sithole a mother to twelve children as she already had six-year-old twins. She told “Pretoria News” that she wasn’t on any fertility treatment when she gave birth and that it was all-natural.
The possibly new record holder told the publication that she gave birth twenty-nine weeks into her pregnancy. She shares the children with her unemployed partner, Teboho Tsotetsi, who had this to say after the birth:
“I am happy. I am emotional. I can’t talk much. Let’s talk again in the morning please.”
The news of Sithole expecting what she thought were octuplets was picked up last month. However, the interview done at their Tembisa home was delayed by the publication at the couple’s request.
They [doctors] were shocked when multiple ultrasounds confirmed this [seven babies].
Sithole and Tsotetsi requested the delay because of cultural and safety reasons. At the time, the former had said she was fascinated and shocked when doctors told her she was expecting sextuplets.
Further scans then revealed that she was, in fact, going to have octuplets. The two extra children hadn’t been detected before because they were growing inside the wrong tube, according to Sithole.
On Tuesday, Guinness World Records noted that it was aware of Sithole’s news. They sent their best wishes and congratulations to the family and confirmed they were looking into verifying the births.
When Cissé gave birth to her nonuplets, doctors were also surprised because they had only detected seven children during scans. Mali's government actually flew her to Morocco for specialist care.
In 2009, doctors at the Kaiser Permanente Bellflower Medical Center in southern California discovered a woman was carrying seven babies! They were shocked when multiple ultrasounds confirmed this.