32-year-old Kelsey Hatcher gave birth to a girl on Tuesday and another daughter on Wednesday at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Hospital.
The girls are described as twins – albeit with rare separate birthdays.
A UAB obstetrician confirmed the trio were fine, telling the BBC it was the kind of case that most people in her profession “go through a whole career and never see.”
Kelsey Hatcher was 17 years old when she found out she had a double set of wombs. Only 0.3 percent of all women have it. The odds of getting pregnant with a child in each womb are even smaller. That’s one in a million.
The Hatchers took it for granted that it was a baby in one uterus, but when the ultrasound showed that there was also a baby in the other, they were shocked.
“I had to catch my breath… We just couldn’t believe it,” she adds BBC.
“They just had different apartments”
Professor Richard Davis, who was involved in the special birth, pointed out that each baby has had “extra room to grow and develop”.
That was because each baby had its own uterus, he said — unlike a typical twin pregnancy.
Hatcher’s labor was initiated at 39 weeks and required double the monitoring and charting at the hospital – as well as double the staffing.
The first baby, Roxi, was born vaginally at around 19:45 local time on December 19. The other girl, named Rebel, was delivered by C-section more than 10 hours later.
Professor Davis believes the girls could be called twins – a term used when each child develops from a separate egg and each fertilized by a separate sperm.
“At the end of the day, it was two babies in one stomach at the same time.” “They just had different apartments,” he tells the BBC