Mich. woman with 2 wombs delivers twins

Bithika Khargarhia

March 2, 2009

Mother has a condition known as uterus didelphyswomen.

New York, March 2: In a strange delivery case, a woman with two wombs has given birth to two healthy daughters - one from each uterus.

The northern Michigan woman, named Sarah Reinfelder, delivered the twins seven weeks premature via Caesarean section on Thursday at Marquette General Hospital in the Upper Peninsula.

The 21-year-old mother and her twin girls, Kaylin Joy and Valerie Marie, are doing fine, Dr. Connie Hedmark and Dr. Breanna Pond, who delivered the babies, said.

Doctors first delivered Kaylin, who weighed 3 pounds, 15 ounces, and then Valerie, who weighed 4 pounds, 15 ounces.

Although the babies are healthy and doing well, they still need to stay in hospital for several weeks until their lungs start working properly, Neonatologist Julie Frei said.

Sarah Reinfelder, born with a condition called uterus didelphys, which means she actually has two wombs, learned a few years ago after a miscarriage that she had two wombs.

Doctors have been calling Sarah Reinfelder’s delivery “miraculous”, and the baby girls “rare twins”, as the chance of conceiving twins, with one baby in each womb, is considered to be rare, happening to an estimated one in 25 million women.

Reinfelder already has a healthy 10-month-old son William with her husband Shane. Not very long after the birth of William, she came to know she was pregnant again - this time with twins.

"They told me your birth control isn't working, guess what, you're pregnant!" Sarah said. "I was like okay. And then they did the ultrasound and said guess what you're pregnant twice! And that's when I almost wet my pants."

Reinfelder and Shane, who are originally from Sault Ste. Marie, have been living in Marquette for about two months to be close to the hospital.

Uterus didelphys is a condition in which the womb develops in two parts, each with a single horn linked to the ipsilateral fallopian tube that faces its ovary. The condition occurs in one per 3,000 women. Women with the condition may be unaware of having a double uterus.

Although delivering twins in such a way is rare, there have been several documented cases of a woman having two wombs giving birth to a baby from each uterus.

In 2006, a British woman with a double uterus gave birth to triplets, a pair of identical twins from an egg that had implanted in one womb and then divided, and an infant from a single egg that implanted into the other womb.

In 1981, another triplet pregnancy in a woman with uterus didelphys was reported from Israel. In this case, one baby had died in utero, and of the remaining babies, one was delivered at 27 weeks gestation and the other more than two months later.