Woman conceives baby while already pregnant in rare case

ABC NEWS (Australia)

An Australian mum has conceived a baby while already pregnant. It's a rare medical marvel that has fertility experts in a spin, and they say there are potentially more cases that are unreported.

Transcript

00:00 So we have been called a medical miracle because it just couldn't have happened really.

00:07 Oh you're warming up now are you?

00:11 So Sandra gets pregnant.

00:13 18 days later gets pregnant again with twins with different due dates.

00:20 My husband and I just sat there in silence because we didn't really understand what was going on.

00:27 I just knew that it was going to be a lot of explaining to people how it happened.

00:31 After passing routine health checks and getting what she thought was her period,

00:35 Sandra started an IVF cycle without realising she'd already gotten pregnant naturally.

00:40 They were telling me that potentially we'd had sex during the cycle and I said no.

00:46 So we got an early scan which showed a 7 or 8 week sized foetus which was about 18 days ahead of where it should have been

00:55 plus another little sac which was consistent with our really early pregnancy from the IVF cycle.

01:00 So when she was born Poppy here was considered full term.

01:04 Michael was prem and they had different developmental milestones.

01:09 Firstly in size, so Michael was 2 kilos and Poppy was 3 kilos.

01:16 So Michael hadn't quite developed the sucking reflex whereas Poppy was able to feed straight away.

01:24 For obvious reasons they had to be born the same day but picking a date was tricky.

01:28 Known as superfetation twins they are crazy rare.

01:32 There's only about 10 confirmed cases of them in the world.

01:35 There's likely to be some extra cases out there that are under reported and we just don't know about.

01:40 There's even been cases of one pregnancy with two biological fathers.

01:44 There are cases reported where people have ovulated spontaneously days apart

01:51 and you have a superfetation there.

01:55 That's rarer than the case we're talking about with the IVF.

01:58 The reason why we wanted to share it is that it is a good news story.

02:02 It's been a happy accident.

02:06 We could have the family that we'd dreamt of but we've got a bit more than we bargained for but I'm not complaining.

02:13 [BLANK_AUDIO]

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