A woman in Australia is pregnant with twins, after undertaking a treatment to be able to conceive. The woman was told it would be very unlikely for her to ever have a child; however, as a result of the treatment, she got pregnant with twins 10 days apart.
The condition of Kate Hill is called superfetation, and it involves double-conception. The woman underwent hormonal therapy, after being diagnosed with polycystic ovary syndrome in 2006. The medical condition consists of the ovary not being able to produce eggs. However, the doctors prescribing the treatment were confident about its success rate.
Superfetation — The World's 10th Case
The real plot twist of this story is that not only did the woman get pregnant twice in 10 days, but she only had unprotected intercourse once throughout this period. While the condition is an oddity, due to the fact that similar documented cases are very rare, there is a scientific explanation for the woman's reaction to the hormone therapy.
Generally, conceiving twins occurs as a woman releases two eggs from her ovary at once; the eggs are both fertilized, and internal twins will develop due to this process. However, when it comes to identical twins, the egg splits into two smaller embryos, creating two children who are genetically the same.
In the United States, the birth of twin babies has hit a new high in 2015, with one in 29 children born a twin. According to medical opinions, the reason for this occurrence is that women are now conceiving later than ever. Older mothers are more prone to having twins than younger mothers, and the number of women having children at earlier ages declined during the last decade.
Unlike the chances given by natural conception, women undergoing fertility treatments and in vitro fertilization procedures increases the possibility of having multiple children at once.
Rewriting Australian Medicine
However, the case of this Australian woman is all the more fascinating, as after the fertilization of the first egg, her body released another, which — at its turn — was also fertilized, thus explaining the pregnancy with two children in the span of no more than 10 days.
Another oddity which decreases the possibility of this happening in normal situations is that most women stop ovulating once they manage to get pregnant; her case is the 10th documented case of superfetation worldwide.
The two children are now 10 months old, and they are very different one from the other, from blood type to weight, gestational development or size at birth. As the woman's condition rewrote Australian medical history in nine months, the doctor in charge of her pregnancy actually had to use Google to document the steps to be followed, as he had never been in such a position before.
