Fact Check: Viral video showing a woman with a huge belly is not pregnant, but has a huge tumour
A video is being widely shared on social media with the claim that a native woman in Texas is pregnant with 18 babies
A few years ago a video of a woman with a ballooned belly and nine babies went viral claiming she carried these babies for nine months during her pregnancy. The South African woman in the viral video was identified as Gosiame Thamara Sithole and it later turned out that she was not pregnant and the claim was fabricated.
Now, a similar claim is widely being shared on social media in which a burqa-clad woman with a huge belly is shown and the overlaid text reads, “Native woman in Texas is pregnant with 18 babies”. The video shared by an Instagram user ‘larus.world’ has amassed over 13.K likes so far. The video is also trending on mainstream media.
Fact Check:
During its investigation, the Telugu Post fact check team found the claim to be misleading.
The woman and the curtains and upholstery in the video hinted that the Instagram video is certainly not from Texas, US. The original audio was replaced with some random sound in the viral video. In the comments section, a user ‘nadalghandour’ revealed that “She’s not pregnant, she had a huge tumor. After a while from releasing this video, she passed away.. May her soul rest in peace.”
We tried searching in Google with these keywords but nothing came up. Later, we used InVID to verify the video content. We extracted the key frames from the video and ran a Google Reverse Search.
After exhausting all the keyframes in reverse image search tools, we came across a Facebook user “محمد حميد الحسام “ who had posted the original video on June 30, 2024.
Earlier, on June 10, the same user shared an update with his users stating that the woman ‘Mona Bilquis Saeed’ died after undergoing a major surgery for the removal of the humongous tumour from her abdomen.
The post contains images of the woman, requisition to the blood bank for bottles of blood for transfusion during the surgery and a doctor’s follow-up sheet with a list of possible medications which was signed by Dr Samah [ لدكتورة سماح ] on July 8, 2024. The blood bank shows the name of the medical centre as Al Thawra Modern General Hospital in Sana’a of war-torn Yemen and Dr Samah is the only female surgeon in the entire country, according to the David Nott Foundation.