Kate and Peter, a couple from Brisbane, Australia, were looking forward to being parents. Kate suffered from polycystic ovary syndrome, and after trying for years, they decided to undergo hormone treatment.
Luckily, the treatment worked. Kate and Peter were so excited to find out they were expecting twins!
However, when doctors discovered that one of the twins was not developing properly, they were heartbroken.
10 days after receiving the bad news, Kate went back for a new checkup to check that everything was fine.
The surprise came when the doctor told the couple that not only was everything perfectly fine, but also that Kate had become pregnant for the second time while she had her daughter in her womb.
His doctor couldn’t believe it, he had never seen anything like this and he didn’t understand how it could have happened. Everyone knows that a pregnant woman does not ovulate until her baby is born.
However, Kate’s case was the exception that proved the rule. Peter’s sperm remained alive for 10 days and was able to fertilize the second egg.
The second baby was also a girl.
The term that describes what happened that day is called “superfetation” and it is an extremely rare phenomenon that caused Kate to become pregnant when she was already pregnant.
Superfetation is the formation of an embryo when another from a different estrous cycle was already present in the uterus.
Dr. Brad Armstrong, from Greenslopes Private Hospital in Australia, was baffled. With the number of years he had been in medicine, he had never seen a case of superfetation before.
Because there are only 10 documented cases of superfetation in the world, Dr. Armstrong had to examine different medical books that talked about the subject.
Charlotte and Olivia Hill were born at the same time, although they varied in size and weight. They are now 10 months old and very happy and healthy babies.
