The year after being sold into marriage at the age of 12, Mariam Nabatanzi gave birth to twins. After then, there were three more sets of twins, five sets of triplets, five sets of quadruplets, and five more sets of quadruplets. Nabatanzi had given birth to 44 children by the time she was 40 years old, but only once to a single child. The physicians say the Ugandan woman has a rare medical condition, and no family planning method can help. She was told she had hyperovulation, a condition characterized by excessively large ovaries that discharge several eggs at once.
Her condition predisposes her to hyper-ovulate, which increases the chance of having numerous pregnancies. She was forewarned by doctors that if she stopped having children, she might experience health problems. Family sizes are already large in Uganda. The average fertility rate in Africa is 5.6 children per woman, which is higher than the global average of 2.4 children and one of the highest rates in the world, according to the World Bank. But Nabatanzi’s family size makes her an obvious outlier even in Uganda.
