How Many Babies Can a Woman Have in Lifetime

Did 1 woman really give nascency to 69 children?

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Conceiving and raising one child is demanding enough – still historical reports suggest that one woman bore 69. Are they true? And volition modern medicine push the limit even further?

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If British tabloids had existed in the 18th Century, they would have gone utterly barmy over the family of Russian peasant Feodor Vassilyev.

Why? His get-go wife – whose proper name is lost to history – holds the widely cited earth record for bearing the virtually children. According to a local monastery's report to the government in Moscow, betwixt 1725 and 1765 Mrs Vassilyev popped out sixteen pairs of twins, vii sets of triplets and four sets of quadruplets, over 27 carve up labours. The 1000 full: 69 children.

You tin only imagine how a nowadays-24-hour interval newspaper editor would react to such fecundity, specially given the tabloid clamour in recent years over octuplet mother Nadya "Octomom" Suleman, who has fourteen children, or the Radford family in United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland, which has 16 kids – and a TV evidence.

So, is it fifty-fifty possible to birth 60+ children? "It sounds fantastical. I mean, 69 kids? C'monday!" says James Segars, director of the Division of Reproductive Science and Women'south Health Inquiry at Johns Hopkins University.

I decided to dig a flake deeper into this astonishing – and seemingly dubious – merits, by consulting reproduction experts. My hope was to detect the fundamental limits to how many children a woman could ever naturally have. But along the style, I also discovered that if y'all take mod science into account, a woman could, in theory, become the female parent to more children than we ever thought possible.

In the UK, only around 1.5% of pregnancies atomic number 82 to twins, and as for triplets, it's a vanishingly small iii ten-thousandths of a pct (Credit: Getty Images)

First, let'southward consider the mathematics of the Vassilyev report. Would she have had plenty time for 27 pregnancies in the forty year-bridge that is claimed? Initially, the answer appears to exist yes, particularly if y'all take into business relationship the fact that triplets and quadruplets are normally birthed later shorter-than-average terms.

Some rough calculations: xvi twins times 37 weeks; seven triplets times 32 weeks; iv quadruplets times thirty weeks. Add together it up, and Mrs Vassilyev would have been pregnant for 18 years of the 40 years – half of the time, or two-decades-worth of craving pickles and ice cream.

Just whether that would be possible in reality is some other matter.

For starters, could she have been fertile enough over such a long time period? Women typically get through menarche at around age xv, when their ovaries brainstorm releasing usually a single egg every 28 days. This ovulation continues until the egg supply, insofar as we know, is wearied at menopause, the typical onset of which is 51 years of historic period.

Virtually women don't become pregnant past their mid-forties, so would at that place exist plenty time to take 69 children? (Credit: Getty Images)

Well earlier menopause, though, women'southward fertility plummets. "The percentage take chances of having a babe per cycle when a woman is 45 [years sometime] is about 1% per month," says Valerie Baker, an associate professor of obstetrics and gynaecology at the Stanford Schoolhouse of Medicine.

As women go older, egg quantity and quality diminish. Halfway through fetal development, unborn females have as many as vii one thousand thousand immature egg cells, simply they are built-in with closer to only one million eggs. Simply a few hundred thousand eggs and then persist into adulthood. And of these legions, technically known as follicles, something similar 400 ever mature and eventually ovulate, assuming a 30-twelvemonth bridge of potential childbearing.

The final of these eggs, ovulated late in a woman's fertility window, have far higher chances of accruing harm and mutations, such as chromosomal abnormalities. Many pregnancies with these atypical eggs cocky-terminate.

"Most women don't get pregnant past 44, 42 [years of age]," says Segars. "Just you lot'll occasionally hear of people pregnant in their late 40s."

Females are born with close to only one million eggs, and the number rapidly dwindles (Credit: Getty Images)

What'south more, the ability to become pregnant goes down with each pregnancy, as successive labours accept their toll out on a woman'due south reproductive anatomy. And if Mrs Vassilyev were breastfeeding, as might be expected for a peasant who could non beget to keep wet nurses well-nigh, her torso would not ovulate. This built-in, biological method of birth command would lengthen the odds even further for her getting pregnant every bit often as she evidently must have for 69 crumbsnatchers.

Feodor and his wife, therefore, would accept had to be extremely lucky (or, arguably, unlucky) to have kept hitting the mark into her 50s.

Surviving labour

The hurdles for ushering 69 children into the world inappreciably stop there, however. The winding down of a adult female'southward "biological clock" makes a lot of sense from an evolutionary perspective, for conveying and delivering a kid is an incredibly difficult task fabricated harder with age.

"Nature would want to brand limits," says Baker. "Pregnancy is the near physically rigorous thing a woman'southward body e'er goes through."

The burden of labour is what actually begins to undermine the credibility of Vassilyev's 69 children claim – especially considering the setting of hundreds of years ago, out in the Russian countryside.

Multiple twins or triplets could in principle allow for high numbers of children, merely the wellness risks are great (Credit: SPL)

In developed nations, modern obstetric care, such equally medically necessary caesarean sections, has slashed maternal mortality rates. In the Uk, just eight women per 100,000 live births die due to pregnancy-related issues while pregnant or inside six weeks of ending a pregnancy, according to the most recent statistics from the World Bank. Meanwhile, in 1 of the poorest countries on the planet, Sierra Leone, the rate is one,100 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births.

Assuming Mrs Vassilyev survived 27 labours is appropriately dubious. "In the past, every pregnancy was a take chances to the mother's life," says Segars. Notably, the risks for serious, deadly complications, such as hemorrhaging, skyrocket with multiple births such as quads.

"Every pregnancy back then was a complication, even a singleton," says Tilly.

An atrocious lot of nippers

Mrs Vassilyev's multiple conceptions of twins, triplets and quadruplets further strains credibility. Fetal twins and their more numerous permutations come up nigh in one of ii ways: either multiple ovulated eggs are successfully fertilised by sperm – then-chosen fraternal twins – or a single fertilised egg divides into two or more viable embryos, leading to identical twins with the same genetic code.

Overall, these events are very rare. In the United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland in 2012, for example, the chances of birthing twins stood at simply 1.5% of pregnancies; triplets, a vanishingly small three x-thousandths of a percent, and quadruplets or more, only 3 instances out of 778,805 maternities, co-ordinate to statistics compiled by the Multiple Births Foundation.

True, a propensity to have twins does run in families, so Feodor'south wife could arguably have been but an extreme example. But overall, the odds for Mrs Vassilyev to accept somehow conceived and and so survived the cranking out of xvi twins alone – allow lonely the quads – seem astronomical. "Even only the 16 sets of twins? I'd exist shocked," says Jonathan Tilly of Northeastern University, who is investigating oocyte stalk cells for their apply in infertility and women's health (which we'll hear more than nearly afterward on).

Modern fertilisation techniques mean births of countless children could, in theory, be possible (Credit: SPL)

Yet another red flag in the Vassilyev tale: supposedly 67 of those 69 children survived infancy. Baby mortality was high in the 18th Century for total-term singletons, and dismally more than so for higher-order births, who are almost always born pre-term and less healthy. "Fifty-fifty if you had four sets of quads today, I'm not sure they'd all survive," says Segars.

Finally, there's one question that beggars conventionalities: what woman would want to do this? "Only think of the stress!" says Baker.

Segars agrees. The terminal reason he doubts the Vassilyev merits? "Sanity! I couldn't imagine living in that house."

If it were true after all, however, the daunting childcare duties could be part of the reason why after decades of marriage, the Vassilyev couple split up. One-time homo Feodor took a 2nd wife, who allegedly had "only" 18 children. Talk about tabloid provender.

Brave new world

So what is the bodily limit? Answering that question today is complicated because the "natural" limits to offspring from an individual adult female no longer strictly apply.

For starters, assisted reproductive technologies (ART) developed in the late 1970s has led to a fasten in twins, triplets and and then on. ("Octomom" Suleman, for case, used Art.) The fact that surrogate mothers tin now carry the biological fetuses of other people also potentially increases the maximum number of children possible within one family.

I researcher believes that it might i day exist possible to switch on a woman's ability to produce vastly more eggs (Credit: SPL)

But perhaps most intriguingly, enquiry findings in the last few years hint that the outer limits of female person reproduction could exist much greater than we tin can imagine. Recent studies suggest woman's ovaries comprise "oocyte stalk cells" that, if properly stimulated, might allow her to produce eggs in about unlimited number.

Tilly and colleagues have documented these cells in creatures ranging from flies to monkeys and, in 2012, humans, likewise. While oocyte stem cells do not produce eggs in humans, they do in other creatures. Female flies make fresh eggs routinely this way.

While many doctors in his field harbour doubts, Tilly believes the mechanism in women could, in principle, exist switched on, helping women whose existing egg supply is in dire straits or prematurely exhausted from cancer treatment, for example.

If that hypothetical procedure does plow out to be possible, consider this extreme scenario: fertility drugs could be used to induce ovarian hyperstimulation, wherein multiple follicles mature and ovulate at once. These bunches of eggs could so exist surgically removed and fertilised in vitro, outside the body, for subsequent surgical placement into the uterus of an army of surrogate mothers, who would carry the foetus (or foetuses) to term. Each 1 could potentially have twins – or more.

From a reproductive perspective, and so, women could therefore be more like men – with the capability of mothering hundreds if not thousands of children, leaving Mrs Vassilyev in the dust.

Tilly makes clear that his research is not in any way intended to open the doors to women having thousands of children. The idea is to assist the fertility of those who are struggling. Even so, he's hopeful it might level the playing field when it comes to fertility across the genders.

Men can father hundreds of children: what if scientific discipline could let women to practise the same? (Credit: SPL)

After all, homo males produce millions of sperm daily throughout their lives, pregnant they have essentially no natural limit to how many children they might sire other than available, ovulating partners. The conqueror (and possibly inveterate rapist) Genghis Khan probable fathered hundreds of children across his continent-of-Asia-spanning empire approximately 800 years ago; genetic evidence implies some 16 million people alive today are descended from him.

"Theoretically, men can begetter children into a very advanced historic period and if they start having children young, then you tin can go the Genghis Khan model," says Tilly. Assuming his research fully pans out, when information technology comes to practically answering the question of biological progeny, "male fertility doesn't actually have a limit," Lilly says, "and women's doesn't, either."

Clearly, this scenario of mothers with countless children would cause quite a stir if information technology comes to pass – perhaps even more and so than the 69 children of Mrs Vassilyev. Would a homo who fathered scores of children present raise the same hackles, though, and if not, is that fair?

"People care for unlimited male person fertility with a shrug, because anybody knows we tin can do it," says Tilly. "As soon as we start talking about the infinite possibility of female fertility, though, people get crazy." He feels a sense of perspective should be kept and that the equality women accept deservedly sought in recent decades should use to procreation equally well. Says Tilly on the thing: "In that location really should be no difference between the sexes."

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Source: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20151020-did-one-woman-really-give-birth-to-69-children