India: 60-Year-Old Hospitalised for Stomach Pain Gives Birth to Baby Girl

A 60-year-old Indian woman was surprised on Thursday 13 June when she gave birth to a baby girl she had no idea she was expecting. The new mother is from the city of Indore in the state of Madhya Pradesh.

Identified as Lilabai, the woman is already a mother of three children - two daughters and a 13-year-old son. She was taken to the Prakash Chand Sethi Hospital on Tuesday, complaining of stomach pain.

There was a shock in store for Lilabai though, when doctors revealed she was pregnant. She was shifted to the maternity ward at the Maharaja Yeshwantrao Hospital (MYH), where the baby was delivered via C-section.

A resident of Rasanpura village in the Khandwa district, Lilabai displayed low haemoglobin levels, forcing doctors at MYH to stabilise her condition before the surgery, according to a report by The Times of India.

The surgery, though, was a success, with Dr Lakshmi Maru, the head of the gynaecology department, said: "The patient and the baby are healthy. The lady has delivered a girl baby weighing 3.5 kg."

According to a report by India Today, a senior health officer who treated Lilabai was not worried about any medical complications for either mother or child, except for the possibility the latter could be orphaned at an early age.

Incidentally, this is not the first time a woman in her sixties has given birth. The world's oldest mother is Indian.

Rajo Devi, from Alewa village in the country's Haryana state, gave birth to a baby in November five years ago, at the age of 70. She conceived through in-vitro fertilisation (IVF). She beat the record held by Spain's Maria del Carmen Bousada de Lara, who gave birth to twin boys a week before her 67th birthday. Sadly, she died of stomach cancer two and a half years later.