A US woman with a rare double uterus has given birth twice in two days – after a ‘one in a million’ pregnancy and a total of 20 hours in labour. Kelsey Hatcher, 32, gave birth to a daughter on Tuesday and a second on Wednesday at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Hospital. Announcing the arrival of her babies as a miracle on social media, Mrs Hatcher hailed the doctors as “unbelievable”.

The girls are described as fraternal twins, with rare separate birthdays. Mrs Hatcher said the family were now back home and could “enjoy the holidays”. She had previously waited for a certain date for Christmas. The mother was told at the age of 17 that she had a double uterus (uterus didelphys) – which the UAB described as a rare congenital anomaly affecting 0.3% of women.

According to the hospital, the odds of conceiving in both uteruses – or a dicavitary pregnancy – were even lower, at “one in a million”. Cases reported worldwide are extremely rare. In 2019, a doctor in Bangladesh told the BBC that a woman had given birth to twins almost a month after giving birth to a premature baby in her other womb.

Ms. Hatcher had three previous, healthy pregnancies. This time, she believed she was pregnant in just one womb – until a routine ultrasound revealed she also had a baby in the second. “I gasped… We just couldn’t believe it,” she recalls.

The woman continued to document her unusual journey on Instagram. An update at 38 weeks asked: “What the hell?! How did we get here?”

UAB described her pregnancy as routine. Prof Richard Davis, who co-managed the delivery, noted that each baby had enjoyed “extra space to grow and develop”. That was because each baby had its own womb, he said – unlike a typical twin pregnancy.

Mrs Hatcher’s labor was induced at 39 weeks and required double monitoring at the hospital as well as doubling the staff. Her obstetrician described “a cheer from everyone in the room” when the first baby was delivered vaginally at around 19:45 local time on December 19.

The second came by C-section more than 10 hours later, around 6:10 the next morning. Prof Davis said the girls could be called fraternal twins – a term used when each child develops from a separate egg, each fertilized by a separate sperm. “At the end of the day, it was two babies in one womb at the same time,” he said. “They just had different apartments.”