An American woman with a rare condition that caused her to have two uteruses gave birth twice in two days – in a total of 20 hours of labor.
Kelsey Hatcher, 32, gave birth to a girl on Tuesday and a second daughter on Wednesday at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Hospital.
Announcing the arrival of her “miracle babies” on social media, Hatcher thanked the doctors, who she said were “amazing.”
The girls are described as fraternal twins – but they are a rare case of having different birthdays.
Hatcher said the family has already returned home to “enjoy the holiday season.” She already expected the births to take place around Christmas.
An obstetrician at UAB confirmed the trio were fine and told the BBC it was the kind of case most people in their profession don’t see in their entire careers.
Rare condition
Hatcher was told at age 17 that she had a double uterus (uterus didelphys), which UAB describes as a rare congenital anomaly that affects 0.3 percent of women.
And the chances of getting pregnant in both uteruses – a dicavitary pregnancy – are even lower, at “one in a million,” according to UAB.
Reported cases around the world are extremely rare. In 2019, a doctor in Bangladesh told the BBC that a woman gave birth to twins almost a month after giving birth to a premature baby that grew in the other uterus.
Hatcher has had three previous healthy pregnancies. This time, she believed she was pregnant with just one uterus – until a routine ultrasound revealed there was also a baby in the second.
“It took my breath away… We just couldn’t believe it,” she recalled.
She began documenting her journey on Instagram.
Despite the rare case, her pregnancy was uneventful – UAB described it as routine.
Doctor Richard Davis, who attended the birth, said each baby enjoyed “extra space to grow and develop”.
This was because each baby had its own uterus, he said – unlike a typical twin pregnancy.
Hatcher’s labor was induced at 39 weeks and required twice the monitoring at the hospital — and twice the staff.
Shweta Patel, from the hospital’s obstetrics and gynecology team, said the UAB team didn’t have “a lot of evidence or data” about cases like this and so they used their knowledge of typical pregnancies.
The babies had “wills of their own,” she said, and were born by different methods.
The first, Roxi, was born vaginally at around 7:45 pm local time on December 19th. The second, named Rebel, underwent a cesarean section more than 10 hours later.
Davis said the girls could be called fraternal twins — a term used when each baby develops from a separate egg, each fertilized by a separate sperm.
“At the end of the day, it was two babies in the same belly at the same time,” he said.