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(NEW YORK) — A woman who was born with a rare condition known as double uterus gave birth to two twin girls whom she carried in each of her uteruses during her pregnancy.
Kelsey Hatcher of Dora, Alabama, delivered one girl on Tuesday, and another on Wednesday following 20 hours of labor, according to the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
“Our miracle babies were born! They decided they were rare enough statistically that they should just go ahead and have their own birthdays too,” Hatcher wrote on Instagram.
Her first baby, named Roxi, was delivered vaginally at 7:45 p.m. on Dec. 19, weighing 7 pounds 7 ounces, the press release said. Meanwhile, her second baby named Rebel was delivered via c-section a little over 10 hours after her sister was born, on Dec. 20, at 6:10 a.m. weighing 7 pounds 3.5 ounces.
In a press release, Hatcher, who was already a mother of three before her fourth pregnancy with the twins, credited the assistance from UAB while announcing the birth of her two girls.
“Bringing our two healthy baby girls into this world safely was always the goal, and UAB helped us accomplish that,” Hatcher said in the release. “It seems appropriate that they had two birthdays, though. They both had their own ‘houses,’ and now both have their own unique birth stories.”
“After such a long and crazy journey, it meant the world to see both of my girls together for the first time,” Hatcher said, according to the release.
Hatcher was born with two uteruses and two cervixes, a rare condition also known as uterine didelphys, or double uterus. This condition, present in only 0.3 percent of people with uteruses, develops when the reproductive organs form differently in an embryo. People with double uteruses can experience pain, fertility issues, or sometimes no symptoms at all.
The odds of being pregnant at the same time in each uterus are about “1 in a million,” according to Dr. Richard Davis, a maternal and fetal medicine specialist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s Women & Infants Center, where Hatcher was being treated.
This was the first of her four pregnancies with her husband Caleb in which she carried one baby in each uterus. Speaking to “Good Morning America” last month, Hatcher said she had a single baby carried in one uterus in her previous pregnancies with her kids – now ages 7, 4, and 2 that also went full-term, with no complications.
While Hatcher did not carry both babies in one uterus like a typical twin pregnancy, Davis said in a press release, “it is safe to call the girls fraternal twins.”
“At the end of the day, it was two babies in one belly at the same time. They just had different apartments,” Davis added.
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