65-year-old expecting quadruplets

BERLIN – A 65-year-old German mother of 13 is getting ready to give birth again – this time to quadruplets.

Annegret Raunigk, a Berlin schoolteacher, is expected to give birth to the four babies within the next two months, Bild newspaper and RTL television reported.

She already has children ranging in age from 9 to 44, from five fathers. Raunigk said she decided to become pregnant again because her 9-year-old daughter wanted a younger sibling.

Her decision was met with widespread criticism by medical professionals as a risk to her and the unborn babies.

“Any pregnancy of a woman over age 45 has to be considered a high-risk pregnancy; over 60 this is naturally extreme,” Dr. Holger Stepan, head of obstetrics at the University of Leipzig, said.

“The 65-year-old body is definitely not designed to carry a pregnancy, not of one child and certainly not of quadruplets,” he said.

Raunigk told Bild that donated eggs were fertilized and implanted at a clinic outside Germany, a procedure that was successful only after multiple attempts.

She defended her decision: “How does one have to behave at 65?”

“They can see it how they want to,” she said, “and I’ll see it the way I think is right.”