Hospital Will Care For Septuplets Until Mother Can Cope Family Already Has Six Children At Home

With money short, lodgings cramped and six other children already at home, a Saudi mother of septuplets has persuaded a hospital to keep her seven newborns until she’s ready to cope with them.

For now, Hasna Mohammed Humair and her husband, a retired civil servant with a modest pension, are content to visit the 7-week-olds each day at Abha Maternity Hospital.

“They’re still small,” she said of the four boys and three girls, gesturing with hands colored with traditional henna. “They could get sick. They’re better off at the hospital, where doctors can look after them.

“As soon as I get someone to help me, I’ll bring them home,” she pledged Tuesday, sitting in her crowded limestone home in mountainous Abha, a remote town in eastern Saudi Arabia.

Humair, at 40, was taking fertility drugs to regulate her menstrual cycle when she became pregnant. Hers are only the third set of septuplets known to have been born alive.

At first, the hospital had demanded that she and husband Abdullah Mohammed Ali retrieve their newborns, but officials have relented in recent days.

Humair’s predicament is markedly different from that of Bobbi McCaughey, an American who delivered septuplets last November in Iowa. About 60 volunteers work in shifts at the McCaughey’s threebedroom home in Carlisle, Iowa, to care for the babies.

Humair is hoping to hire two nannies to help raise her own newborns, but money is tight.

The couple had rented out two of their four bedrooms to supplement their income - and had to ask the lodgers to leave. But the rooms are still bare, with no cribs, toys or stuffed animals.

Ali, who draws a $1,066 monthly pension, drives a cab to help make ends meet.

He named the baby boys after some of Saudi Arabia’s most powerful royals - King Fahd, Defense Minister Prince Sultan, Interior Minister Prince Nayef and Riyadh Governor Prince Salman.

The Saudi leaders were touched and made financial contributions to the family. Ali wouldn’t say how much.

“We can survive now, but it’s going to be very expensive later, raising the kids and sending them to school and college,” Ali said. “The first thing I will buy is a large four-wheel drive car, and we’ll save the rest for their education.”

Every day, Humair and Ali drive to the hospital in their pick-up truck to visit the newborns.

Inside the hospital nursery, Humair banters with the nurses she has grown to know so well, then goes to see every baby. Since she can’t read the names on the cots - she’s illiterate - she tells the babies apart by remembering their cots.

“Why is Salman crying?” she asks a nurse, then picks up a milk bottle and coaxes the boy to drink.

Humair said she was “overwhelmed” when she learned she had seven more mouths to feed.

“I didn’t want more than one, but when I saw them, so small and helpless, like any mother I fell in love with them,” she said, smiling. “I always miss the babies. When I’m not with them, I’m thinking of them.”