A Russian woman has given birth to five healthy quintuplet girls at a British hospital after defying Russian doctors who suggested she abort some of the foetuses.

"They're very well. All five," Lawrence Impey, a doctor at John Radcliffe hospital in Oxford, told BBC radio.

Giving birth to quintuplets can be dangerous and historically it has been rare that all five children survive. The couple were advised in Russia to abort some of the foetuses, but decided to give birth in Britain instead, where their medical costs were said to be paid by a Russian charity. The babies were born 14 weeks early last Saturday. Impey said the biggest of the babies was just under a kilogram in weight, but they were all now out of the most intensive form of care and could return to Russia in the next four to five months.

"The principle risk is that they're born so early that they don't survive. And in this case she got to a time when they have survived," he said.

"Throughout most of the pregnancy, I don't think she really thought that she was going to end up with five live little babies, and to be fair, we didn't think that either. "So everybody's absolutely thrilled but, of course, most of all, her and her family.