- A woman in Alabama with a double uterus gave birth to two babies in two days.
- Kelsey Hatcher, 32, was diagnosed with uterus didelphys at 17.
- The University of Alabama at Birmingham said it was a “one in a million” pregnancy.
A woman with a double uterus gave birth to a rare set of twins over two days at the University of Alabama at Birmingham Hospital earlier this month.
Kelsey Hatcher, 32, was diagnosed with uterus didelphys, or a double uterus when she was 17.
The University of Alabama at Birmingham’s news site described it as a “rare congenital anomaly that occurs in 0.3 percent of women.” It said Hatcher’s pregnancy was a “one in a million.”
Hatcher, who had had three previous pregnancies, discovered she had a baby in both uteruses — known as a dicavitary pregnancy — during an ultrasound.
“As soon as she moved the wand to the other uterus, I gasped,” Kelsey recalled. “Sure enough, there was another baby. We just could not believe it.”
Despite the rarity of the event, Hatcher had a “routine” pregnancy and went on to give birth to two girls, one on December 19 and one on December 20,
“Never in our wildest dreams could we have planned a pregnancy and birth like this, but bringing our two healthy baby girls into this world safely was always the goal, and UAB helped us accomplish that,” Kelsey said.
“It seems appropriate that they had two birthdays, though. They both had their own ‘houses,’ and now both have their own unique birth stories,” she added.
Richard Davis, one of Hatcher’s doctors, said that typical twin pregnancies could leave the twins with limited space as they share a womb, “making preterm or early birth a high possibility.”
But “with Kelsey’s babies, they each had their own womb, sac, placenta and umbilical cord, allowing them extra space to grow, and develop,” he added.
Davis noted that it was “safe to call the girls fraternal twins,” as “at the end of the day, it was two babies in one belly at the same time. They just had different apartments.”
There are few recorded cases of dicavitary pregnancies from around the world, but in 2019, the BBC reported the case of a woman in Bangladesh who gave birth to twins almost a month after delivering a boy after it was discovered she was still pregnant in a second uterus.
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