A “once in a million” pregnancy.
An American woman with a double uterus gave birth twice in two days after a total of 20 hours of labor.
Kelsey Hatcher, 32, gave birth to one daughter on Tuesday and a second on Wednesday at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Hospital in the state of Alabama.
Hatcher announced the arrival of his “miracle babies” on social media and praised the doctors’ work as “incredible.”
The girls are described as fraternal twinsin a strange case in which they celebrate separate birthdays.
Hatcher was scheduled to deliver on Christmas Day, but she is now home ready to “enjoy the holidays.”
At age 17, Hatcher was diagnosed with double uteruswhich the UAB describes as a rare congenital anomaly that It affects 0.3% of women.
The chances of getting pregnant in both wombs are even smaller, at “one in a million” according to UAB.
Unusual cases
Reported cases of this anomaly are extremely rare.
In 2019, a doctor in Bangladesh told the BBC that a woman had given birth to twins almost a month after giving birth to a premature baby in her other womb.
Hatcher had had three other healthy pregnancies in the past. This time she thought that she would only be pregnant in one of her wombs until A routine ultrasound revealed that she was also carrying a baby in her second womb.
“I gasped, we couldn’t believe it,” he remembers.
So he began documenting his unusual path on Instagram.
At week 38 he asked himself, “What the hell!? How did we get this far?!”
Babies in “different apartments”
UAB described Hatcher’s pregnancy as routine.
Professor Richard Davis, one of the birth managers, noted that each baby had enjoyed “extra space to grow and develop.”
This happened because each baby had a womb of its ownthe doctor said, unlike a typical twin pregnancy.
Hatcher’s labor was induced at 39 weeks and required twice as much monitoring and staff involvement at the hospital.
Her obstetrician described “a round of applause from everyone in the room” when the first baby was born around 7.45 pm local time on December 19.
The second was born by caesarean section more than 10 hours later, around 6.10am the next morning.
Professor Davis said the girls could be considered fraternal twins, a term used when each baby develops from a different embryo, each fertilized by different sperm.
“In the end, they are two babies in one belly at the same time, only They had different apartments“Davis said.
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