An Alabama woman who has an extremely rare double uterus and got pregnant in both gave birth to twins last week a day apart, according to a news release from the University of Alabama at Birmingham Hospital.
After a combined 20 hours of labor, Kelsey Hatcher gave birth to her third and fourth children, two baby girls.
The case of having a double uterus is very rare, but doctors said getting pregnant in both was “one in a million.”
Though her due date was Christmas Day, Hatcher was induced at 39 weeks and throughout labor had twice the monitoring and twice the charting. She was also assigned two labor and delivery nurses, the release said.
Baby A, named Roxi, was born vaginally at 7:45 p.m. on Dec. 19, CNN reported.
“There was a cheer from everyone in the room when the first baby was delivered, but there was another baby left,” Dr. Shweta Patel, Hatcher’s obstetrician, said in the news release. “Kelsey was essentially laboring in the left uterus while simultaneously undergoing the postpartum process in the right.”
While having contractions with Baby B, Hatcher was already breastfeeding Baby A, Patel noted.
Nearly 10 hours later, Baby B, named Rebel, was delivered by Cesarean section at 6:10 a.m. on Dec. 20, CNN said.
According to doctors, the girls are technically twins despite having two different birthdays and being in two wombs during pregnancy.
“I think it is safe to call the girls fraternal twins,” said Richard O. Davis, professor in the UAB Division of Maternal-Fetal Medicine and a doctor who co-managed Hatcher’s pregnancy, according to CNN.
“At the end of the day, it was two babies in one belly at the same time. They just had different apartments,” Davis added.
“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,” Hatcher 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.”
According to the nonprofit Cleveland Clinic, the condition of being born with two uteri is called uterus didelphys. It affects only 0.3% of women and is considered one of the least common uterine abnormalities.
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