"Pregnancy is the most physically rigorous thing a woman's body ever goes through." "Nature would want to make limits," says Baker. The winding down of a woman's "biological clock" makes a lot of sense from an evolutionary perspective, for carrying and delivering a child is an incredibly difficult task made harder with age. The hurdles for ushering 69 children into the world hardly stop there, however. This built-in, biological method of birth control would lengthen the odds even further for her getting pregnant as often as she apparently must have for 69 crumbsnatchers.įeodor and his wife, therefore, would have had to be extremely lucky (or, arguably, unlucky) to have kept hitting the mark into her 50s. And if Mrs Vassilyev were breastfeeding, as might be expected for a peasant who could not afford to keep wet nurses about, her body would not ovulate. What’s more, the ability to become pregnant goes down with each pregnancy, as successive labours take their toll out on a woman's reproductive anatomy. "But you'll occasionally hear of people pregnant in their late 40s." "Most women don't get pregnant past 44, 42 ," says Segars. Many pregnancies with these atypical eggs self-terminate. The last of these eggs, ovulated late in a woman's fertility window, have far higher chances of accruing damage and mutations, such as chromosomal abnormalities. And of these legions, technically known as follicles, something like 400 ever mature and eventually ovulate, assuming a 30-year span of potential childbearing. Only a few hundred thousand eggs then persist into adulthood. Halfway through fetal development, unborn females have as many as seven million immature egg cells, but they are born with closer to only one million eggs. "The percentage chance of having a baby per cycle when a woman is 45 is about 1% per month," says Valerie Baker, an associate professor of obstetrics and gynaecology at the Stanford School of Medicine.Īs women get older, egg quantity and quality diminish. Well before menopause, though, women's fertility plummets. I mean, 69 kids? C'mon!" says James Segars, director of the Division of Reproductive Science and Women’s Health Research at Johns Hopkins University. So, is it even possible to birth 60+ children? "It sounds fantastical. You can only imagine how a present-day newspaper editor would react to such fecundity, especially given the tabloid clamour in recent years over octuplet mother Nadya "Octomom" Suleman, who has 14 children, or the Radford family in Britain, which has 16 kids – and a TV show. According to a local monastery's report to the government in Moscow, between 17 Mrs Vassilyev popped out 16 pairs of twins, seven sets of triplets and four sets of quadruplets, over 27 separate labours. Why? His first wife – whose name is lost to history – holds the widely cited world record for bearing the most children. If British tabloids had existed in the 18th Century, they would have gone utterly barmy over the family of Russian peasant Feodor Vassilyev.
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