A woman in the United Kingdom is carrying two babies — twins — in separate wombs in what doctors have termed a “one in 50 million” case.
The woman, 28-year-old Kelly Fairhurst from Braintree, Essex in southeast England, said doctors discovered the condition, called uterus didelphys, when she went in for her 12-week scan. Uterus didelphys is considered a uterine malformation where two uteri appear as a paired organ. Some women also have two cervixes as a result and, in some cases, two vaginas.
The condition affects about 1 in 2,000 women worldwide, according to a 2009 Scientific American interview with a US obstetrician/gynecologist (ob–gyn) who also said that about “one in 25,000 women with uterus didelphys gets pregnant with twins, one to each uterus. [That means the likelihood of any given woman growing two babies in two separate wombs is about one in 50 million.]”
Fairhurst already has two children, ages three and four, and said the news of her condition surprised her, according to a report in the Guardian.
“With my second baby, they said that I might have a bicornuate uterus, which means it’s not fully formed. So when I went for this scan, I was really surprised to learn that I have two of them,” she was quoted as saying.
“I just thought, ‘God, that’s a shock.’ It makes you feel incredibly grateful that this has happened to you and you get to have two amazing babies,” added Fairhurst.
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“The twins could be identical. The condition itself is quite rare, but they went on to tell me that it was a one in a 50 million chance for me to conceive twins in each womb,” she told the Sun.
Fairhurst said doctors told her she might have two separate labors as a result, and their plan is to deliver the babies by cesarean section.
Last year, a 20-year-old woman in Bangladesh gave birth to three babies about a month apart after doctors discovered a second uterus when she went in to hospital complaining of stomach pains some four weeks after her first delivery of a baby girl. The woman gave birth to twins in an emergency C-section the second time around.
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