Reports: 65-year-old German woman expecting quadruplets
A 65-year-old German woman is pregnant with quadruplets, according to media reports.
Annegret Raunigk is already the mother of 13 and grandmother of seven. The school teacher's oldest child is 44, and youngest is nine, the German newspaper Bild reported. She told the newspaper that she wanted to have another child because her nine-year-old daughter wants a playmate.
Raunigk's pregnancy follows several attempts at artificial insemination over the past year-and-a-half.
The newspaper reported that Raunigk is due this summer and so far there have been no complications during the pregnancy.
Her doctor told the paper that older mothers have a higher chance of premature births, so they are monitoring her health closely.
She said she had a tough choice when she found out she was pregnant with not one child but four. Her doctors suggested that she abort one of the fetuses, which could have increased the survival rate of the others.
"That was a shock for me,"Raunigk told Bild. "After the doctor found that there are four, I had to just think about it."
The 65-year-old decided to take her chances.
"I'm not afraid," she told the newspaper.
And Raunigk isn't worried about the gossip that befalls pregnancies in older women, she told Bild. She first graced headlines at age 55, when she gave birth to her youngest child, The Irish Times reported.
Her pregnancy and the birth of the children will be documented by the German broadcaster RTL, according to the Times.
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