The text across the image reads: “Catherine Bridge holds the world record for giving birth to 17 babies. They are all boys.”
The Sinhala caption of the post is translated into English: “May the Triple Gems bless the mother who gave birth to 17 baby boys and set a world record. How nice would it be if Sinhalese had babies like this?
The image and claim have been shared repeatedly on Facebook in Sri Lanka, for example here and here, and have also been posted on social media in many countries, including the Philippines and Nigeria.
The claim has also been shared on Twitter, for example here, here and here, and on Instagram here.
Similar claims have circulated online since at least 2016, for example here.
This statement is false.
A full Yandex image search of the image of the pregnant woman in the post led to this image posted to an online social network for artists in August 2015.
The image in the misleading listing has been digitally manipulated to cause the woman to fall further behind in the pregnancy. Below is a side-by-side comparison of the stock photo and the image in the misleading listing. A reverse Google image search of the photograph of the man in the dark green uniform found the exact same photograph posted here on the Facebook page of a doctor named Robert Biter on August 3, 2012.
A version of the photo also appears on Biter’s official website:
A Google Keword search for the text in the misleading listings found this article, published on the satirical website World Dally News Rеrоrt in February 2014.
The headline reads: “USA: Mother Gives Birth to 17 Babies at Once.”
The introductory paragraph of the satirical article reads in art: “An American woman has completely obliterated the old world record for the most babies in a single country by giving birth to seventeen babies in the last 29 hours. Weekend at Indianapolis Memorial Hospital.
“Catherine Bridges and her husband had been trying to have a child for many years and last year decided to use the medical assistance of a fertility clinic in Rhodes Island.”
The website included this disclaimer noting that its articles are “satirical and fictional” in nature.
This is not the first time that hoaxes about a record number of births have circulated on the World Wide Web. Here is a report published by AFP about a similar attack.
According to the Guinness World Records website, the current record holder for “most children born in a single birth to survive” is American Nadya Suleman, who had eight babies in January 2009.
