An Australian mom who was told she would never be able to get pregnant somehow conceived two girls 10 days apart.
Kate Hill from Brisbane described the impressive event, called superfetation, to Australia’s Seven Network. She says she was taking hormone therapy after having been diagnosed with polycystic ovary syndrome in 2006 – a condition that means the ovaries are not producing any eggs. This meant she was unlikely to get pregnant.
But the treatment apparently worked very well, as she found herself pregnant two times over, despite having only had unprotected sex once within the time period, New York Daily News reports.
Most twins are conceived when two eggs are released from a woman’s ovaries at the same time, which are then fertilized and become fraternal twins. In the more unusual identical twin pregnancies, one fertilized egg halves into two embryos to produce two babies that have the same genetic compositions.
Hill’s case is even rarer, only one of 10 similar medical situations ever documented in the world. After her ovaries released one egg and it got fertilized, it released a second one days later, which was then also fertilized by lingering sperm in her uterus. What makes this extremely unconventional is that women don’t generally ovulate once an egg is conceived.
Mrs. Hill said,
We actually did not realise how special that was until they were born.
The baby’s father, Peter Hill, proudly joked that the double pregnancy was “a hole in one, maybe.”
The couple’s obstetrician, Brad Armstrong, says he had to look up the condition online as he had never seen it happen before – it was that rare. He said, “I could not find any literature in the medical review websites at all,” the BBC reports.
Now 10 months old, the twins, Charlotte and Olivia, had different weights, sizes, blood types, and were at different developmental stages when they were born.
