A woman who got pregnant while already pregnant has shared her story to show that you can conceive again while already months along, meaning you’re carrying two separate pregnancies at once.
The proper term for it is superfetation.
In 2020, 39-year-old Rebecca Roberts and her partner Rhys Weaver, 43, were looking at the ultrasound of their baby boy Noah, who they had conceived 12 weeks earlier, only to find he had company.
While Rebecca had been pregnant with him, she’d fallen pregnant with their little girl Rosalie. The two babies were conceived about three weeks apart.
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"We feel really lucky, it’s so lucky to have twins anyway but to have such special twins, it’s so lovely, it’s wonderful, they are a blessing," she said.
Doctors told Rebecca they believed it to be a case of superfetation, and she couldn’t believe how unique her pregnancy was.
"I didn’t even know that existed. Even my midwife found it baffling," she said.
Despite there being a chance the second baby can die during pregnancy, children’s clothes maker Rebecca gave birth to Noah, weighing 4lb 10oz, and Rosalie, weighing 2lb 7oz, on September 17, 2020, at Royal United Hospital in Bath.
Because of her tiny size, Rosalie was taken to the bigger St Michael’s Hospital in Bristol, where she stayed for 95 days to grow stronger.
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Noah was well enough to stay in Bath but needed treatment in hospital for three weeks, before going home to meet his 14-year-old sister Summer.
Rebecca isn't the only woman in recent times to make news headlines for getting pregnant while already pregnant.
"Medically, it’s considered an anomaly," Dr Misra-Sharp explains. "It’s important to distinguish between superfetation and more common conditions like twinning (both fraternal and identical), which often get confused with it.
"The key difference is that superfetation involves eggs released and fertilised at different times, often weeks apart, while twins result from eggs fertilised at the same time."
The doctor explains that you can usually detect superfetation through perinatal ultrasounds and that, as the pregnancy progresses scans will usually show that the two foetuses are at different stages of development.
"One will be visibly smaller or younger than the other, often by a few weeks," she adds. “In cases of twinning, even if there are size differences, the foetuses are generally of the same gestational age, and any size differences would be attributed to growth issues.
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