Talk about a Christmas miracle.
An Alabama woman born with two uteri is pregnant with a girl in each one — and due on Christmas Day, local NBC affiliate WVTM13 reports.
Kelsey Hatcher and her husband, Caleb, are already parents to three children — ages 7, 4 and 2. She learned in the spring that she was pregnant again, shocking her obstetrician.
“I said, ‘Well, there’s two of them in there.’ And [my husband] said, ‘You’re lying.’ I said, ‘No, I’m not,'” Kelsey explained.
Kelsey already knew she has two uteri, each with its own cervix. Her pregnancies are considered high-risk.
“Very, very rare,” Alabama Dr. Shweta Patel, who specializes in obstetrics and gynecology, told WVTM. “OB/GYNs go their whole careers without seeing anything like this.”
The Mayo Clinic calls a double uterus a “rare condition” that occurs as a female fetus develops — sometimes the two small tubes that form the uterus don’t join completely to create one large organ.
Women with a double uterus often have successful pregnancies — but they are also more likely to experience a miscarriage or premature birth.
“A double cervix or double uteruses way under 1%, maybe three per 1,000 women might have that. And then the probability of you having a twin in each horn is really crazy,” said Dr. Richard Davis, a University of Alabama at Birmingham professor in obstetrics and gynecology who has studied high-risk pregnancies.
Kelsey’s uteri could contract at different times — and she could give birth to each daughter hours or even days apart.
“When she goes into labor, if she does, then we will have to monitor each uterus and see which one’s contracting and if they’re doing sort of almost the same or they’re different,” Davis noted.
Kelsey’s situation is so unusual that doctors don’t know whether to characterize the dual pregnancies as twins. Each baby has its own placenta.
“I think medically, this is such a rare thing that we don’t have a better way of describing it besides still calling them twins,” Patel said.
Kelsey, meanwhile, is looking forward to welcoming both daughters, while acknowledging she could be a case study.
“I’m typically not one that, like likes a lot of attention and doesn’t want people to be talking about all my stuff. And so, to be this rare and kind of out there, I’m like, oh my gosh, there’s a lot,” she reasoned.
She’s more focused on having five children under the age of 8.
“The third one was our last one. But though, we’re grateful for the blessings for sure,” Kelsey shared. “But this will definitely be the end.”