Woman With Two Wombs Gives Birth To Baby Boy And Twins Nearly A Month Apart

A Bangladeshi woman gave birth to twins 26 days after she gave birth to her first child.

Arifa Sultana is the 20-year-old mother with two wombs who gave birth to her first child, a baby boy, in February.  Afterwards, Dr. Sheila Poddar, a gynecologist at Ad-Din hospital in Dhaka, sent the mother and son home. But less than four weeks later, Sultana returned to bear a second child. “She came to the hospital complaining of lower abdominal pain,” Poddar said. Doctors performed an ultrasound and found Sultana was pregnant with twins.

Sultana has a rare condition called uterus didelphys, which means she has two uteruses. Her first baby and the twins were growing in separate wombs. Because she never got an ultrasound during the first delivery, medical officials missed the twins. “It is not very common to have two uteruses. When the uterus develops, it comes from two tubes, and those tubes fuse together. For some women, the fusion does not occur, and the dividing wall does not dissolve,” said Dr. S.N. Basu, head of obstetrics and gynecology at Max Healthcare hospital in New Delhi.

Poddar was able to do a quick C-section, which resulted in the birth of two healthy babies: a boy and a girl. A uterus didelphys is a rare congenital abnormality, and the occurrence of twin gestation has an overall incidence rate of one in a million, according to the National Institutes of Health. The condition is hard for medical officials to miss, CNN reports.

“From rural areas, people don’t know what is wrong with them. They don’t know how many children they are pregnant with and sometimes whether they are pregnant also,” Basu said.