What are the chances of getting pregnant while pregnant? Apparently it can happen…
Defeating all her own odds, Aussie mum Kate Hill, who was receiving hormone treatment for polycystic ovary syndrome in a bid to boost ovulation, managed to conceive two babies at two different times.
The other incredible detail is that Kate and her husband, Peter, who live in Brisbane, only had intercourse once during that 10-day time frame.
“What makes this case even more rare, is that my husband and I only had intercourse one time – his sperm stayed alive for 10 days to fertilise the second egg released,” Kate told Today Tonight.
According to research, sperm can last several days after intercourse, living inside a woman’s vagina, uterus or fallopian tubes.
In Kate’s case, unknowingly, she was already pregnant and in a strange-but-true turn of events, she released a second egg. It was then fertilised, leaving Kate pregnant with two babies, both growing in separate sacs inside her womb.
This extremely rare pregnancy phenomenon is called superfetation: the process in which a second baby begins to grow in a woman’s womb, coexisting with the already-present foetus.
In fact, this occurrence is so rare that the couple’s obstetrician, Dr Brad Armstrong, had to google it!
“Superfetation is so rare that I could not find any literature in the medical review websites at all,” he says.
Congratulations to Kate and Peter!
