The image on the pregnancy test has been digitally altered to make the woman appear more pregnant. Below is a side-by-side comparison of the stock photo (left) and the manipulated photo (right). The exact same photograph of the man wearing dark green scrubs was uploaded to the Facebook page of a physician named Robert Blter on December 3, 2012. The headline is “US: Mother gives birth to 17 babies simultaneously.”
The introductory paragraph of the satirical article states in part: “An American woman has totally annihilated the former World Record for the most babies in a lone pregnancy by giving birth to seventeen babies over 29 hours last weekend at the Indianapolis Memorial hospital.
Catherine Bridges and her husband had been trying to conceive for many years before deciding to seek medical assistance from a fertility clinic in Rhode Island last year.” This website’s disclaimer states that its articles are not religious or fictional in nature.
This is not the first time on the World Wide Web that hoaxes about a record number of births have circulated. Here is a report published by FP on a million-dollar scam. According to the Guinness World Records website, the current record holder for “most children delivered at a single birth” is American Nadya Suleman, who gave birth to eight children in January 2009.
