An American woman with a rare double uterus gave birth twice in two days - after a "one in a million" pregnancy, a total of 20 hours of labor.
Kelsey Hatcher (32) gave birth to her first daughter on Tuesday and her second daughter on Wednesday at a hospital in Alabama.
Announcing the birth of her "miracle babies" on social media, Hatcher thanked the doctors, calling them "amazing."
She described the girls as twins, but with rare separate birthdays.
Hatcher stated that the family returned home just in time to enjoy the Christmas and New Year holidays together.
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When she was 17, she was told she had a double uterus (uterus didelphys), a rare anomaly that only 0,3 percent of women have.
And the chances of a woman getting pregnant in both uteruses, which is called a dicavitary pregnancy, are even less - "one in a million", doctors say.
Reported cases worldwide are extremely rare.
A doctor in Bangladesh told the BBC in 2019 that a woman gave birth to twins almost a month after giving birth to a premature baby in another womb.
Hatcher had three previous, healthy pregnancies.
This time, she believed she was pregnant in only one womb, until a routine ultrasound revealed that the other was carrying another fetus.
"I sighed, we just couldn't believe it," she recalls.
She continued to document her unusual pregnancy on Instagram.
At 38 weeks pregnant, she asked herself, “What the hell is this?! HOW did we manage to get so far?!".
Doctors described her pregnancy as routine.
Professor Richard Davies, who led the delivery, said each baby enjoyed "extra space to grow and develop".
That's because each baby had its own uterus, he said — unlike a typical twin pregnancy.
Kelsey Hatcher's labors were induced at 39 weeks and required twice as much supervision at the hospital as well as twice the number of staff.
Her obstetrician described "everyone in the room cheering" when the first baby was delivered vaginally on December 19 at around 19:45 local time.
The second followed by caesarean section more than 10 hours later, around 06:10 the next morning.
Professor Davies 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.
"In any case, it was two babies in one stomach at the same time. They just had different apartments," humorously described the doctor.
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