The Sinhala caption for this image translates to “May the Triple Gems bless the mother who gave birth to 17 boys and set a world record. How wonderful would it be if the Sinhalese had babies like this?”

Similar ᴀssertions have been circulating online since at least 2016, including on Twitter and Instagram.

This claim is false.

A reverse image search on Yandex of the pregnant woman’s sculpture in the past led to this image posted on an online social network for artists in September 2015.

The image of the pregnancy test has been digitally altered to make the woman appear more pregnant. Below is a side-by-side comparison of the stock pH๏τo (left) and the manipulated pH๏τo (right).

The exact same pH๏τograph 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 reads “US: Mother gives birth to 17 babies simultaneously.”

The introductory paragraph of the satirical article states in part: “An American woman has utterly obliterated 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.

Caterine Bridges and her husband had been trying to conceive for many years before deciding to seek medical ᴀssistance 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.