A Bangladeshi woman with two wombs delivered twins, less than a month after giving birth to a boy, local media reported Tuesday.
Arifa Sultana Iti, 20, was rushed to Khulna Medical College hospital Feb. 25, following complications with her pregnancy. She then gave birth to a premature baby boy the same day through normal delivery. The doctors, however, did not notice the presence of the second uterus.
She returned to the hospital March. 22 after she fell ill. An ultrasonic test revealed that she had two uteri and within a few hours, she gave birth to a boy and a girl through cesarean.
Calling this a “rare incident,” the hospital’s chief gynecologist Sheila Poddar said, “She did not realize that she was still pregnant with the twins. The first baby boy was born from one womb and the twins from the other. It’s a rare incident. I have seen such a case for the first time. I had not even heard about such an incident before,” BDNews24 reported.
The mother and the babies were doing well and discharged from the hospital Tuesday.
“The babies and her are all healthy. I am very, very happy that everything went well,” Dr. Poddar said, BBC reported.
Dilip Roy, the district’s chief government doctor said he had not come across such a case in his medical career spanning for over three decades. He also questioned the doctors of the Khulna Medical College for not detecting the second uterus.
Meanwhile, Iti’s husband said it was a miracle that all his children were healthy and added that he will try and keep them healthy.
A gynecologist in Singapore, however, said the condition of having two uteruses was not rare.
“If you go for a scan beforehand it would be very obvious to see two sets of uteruses. It’s likely that three eggs ovulated and were fertilised at the same time during her fertile period which resulted in three embryos,” Dr. Christopher Ng told BBC.
In a similar incident, a U.K. woman with two wombs gave birth to twins. In December 2017, Jennifer Ashwood learned that she was expecting twins. Two months later, it was revealed that she was having a bicornuate uterus and that she had two wombs with one baby in each. She gave birth to twins at 34 weeks.
