Kelsey Hatcher poses with her daughter, Roxy (left) and Rebel (right), who learned she had twin wombs as a teenager
A rare double-uterine American woman gave birth to two babies in two days – after a "one in a million" pregnancy and a total of 20 hours of delivery.
Kelsey Hatcher, 32, gave birth to a daughter Tuesday at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Hospital and a second on Wednesday.
Ms. Hatcher announced the arrival of her "miracle baby" on social media, praising the medical staff as "incredible".
The girls are described as fraternal twins – rarely with separate birthdays.
Ms. Hatcher said the family is now back at home to "enjoy the holidays". She had expected her due date for Christmas.
An obstetrician at UAB confirmed that all three were doing well and told the BBC that this was the case for most people in her profession who "went through their entire careers and never met".
Ms. Hatcher was told at the age of 17 that she had a double uterus (double uterus) - which the UAB described as a rare congenital anomaly that affected 03% women.
According to UAB data, the probability of getting pregnant in both uteruses - a cavitary pregnancy - is even slimmer, "one in a million".
Cases reported worldwide are extremely rare. In 2019, a doctor in Bangladesh told the BBC that a woman gave birth to twins nearly a month after giving birth to a premature baby in another womb.
Ms. Hatcher has had three previous healthy pregnancies. This time, she thought she was pregnant in only one womb – until a routine ultrasound revealed that she also had a child in her second uterus.
I gasped ......We couldn't believe it, she recalled.
She went on to document her unusual journey on Instagram. An update at 38 weeks asked: What the hell is going on?!How did we get here?!
Kelsey poses with her newborn baby and her husband, Caleb, and at first she thought she was pregnant in only one womb
UAB described her pregnancy as routine. Professor Richard D**is, who co-manages childbirth, notes that each baby enjoys "extra room to grow and develop".
That's because each baby has its own uterus, unlike a typical twin pregnancy, he said.
Ms. Hatcher was induced at 39 weeks and required double monitoring and mapping in the hospital, as well as twice as much staffing.
This proved to be the "most atypical" part of Ms. Hatcher's case, said Dr Shweta Patel of the hospital's obstetrics and gynaecology team.
Dr Patel told the BBC that UAB staff did not have "a lot of evidence or data" on hand and were asked to apply what they knew about a typical pregnancy.
Sure enough, she said, the babies had "a mind of their own" and were delivered using different methods.
The first is Roxi, who was born on December 19 at around 19:45** local time. The second, named Rebel, was delivered by cesarean section more than 10 hours later.
The girls could be called fraternal twins – when each baby develops from a single egg, each egg is fertilised by a single sperm, Professor Davis said.
At the end of the day, there are two babies in one belly at the same time," he said. They just have different apartments.