Postpartum diarrhea after a C-section is normal. Health Conditions Discover Plan Connect. Medically reviewed by Carolyn Kay, M. What causes it when it does happen. How the timing works. Examples of women who have had double pregnancies. Superfetation vs. Possible complications and outcomes. The takeaway. Parenthood Pregnancy Pregnancy Health. Early Pregnancy Symptoms. Read this next.
Are the babies born at the same time? In the earliest known cases, the babies' age difference was discovered after both children were delivered naturally.
These days, the condition shows up during an ultrasound, giving Mom and the medical team time to plan the delivery — usually a planned c-section, since only one of the babies is full-term. Evonne Lack Bradford is an educational writer and an instructional designer. She lives in North Carolina with her husband and three children. In her spare time, she enjoys reading, watching documentaries, and pretending she has a green thumb.
Join now to personalize. Photo credit: Thinkstock. And yet — at least for a handful of women — it has happened. Featured video. Can twins have different fathers? That's because once a woman is pregnant, changes in her hormones typically prevent her body from continuing to ovulate, Dr. Greves explains. But if a woman does ovulate again—and if that egg becomes fertilized and implants in her uterus, she can carry a double pregnancy.
The reasons why a woman might ovulate while she's already pregnant aren't well studied. The truth is not all medical phenomena have a logical explanation. To get our top stories delivered to your inbox, sign up for the Healthy Living newsletter. In short, it's very difficult. She cites one previous case report in which doctors identified a four-week discordance between two fetuses. So for superfetation to take place, it has to be the perfect storm of ovulating very irregularly or, once an egg has already been fertilized, having a second egg get fertilized and successfully implanting on the uterine wall.
Whew, that's a lot. There will be a difference in gestational age with a double pregnancy, because the two babies were conceived at two different times even if a few days or weeks apart. There may also be a gap in the size of the fetuses, but this is also common in regular twins when one twin takes more nourishment than the other, according to research. Twins can also simply grow at different paces, Dr. Minkin notes. And, Dr. Minkin points out, twins are from two presuming fraternal twins, not identical eggs released at the same time, with the same father.
A double pregnancy could technically result from two different sexual encounters with two different people. Again, that would have to rely on a woman ovulating multiple times within a cycle, or ovulating once already pregnant, and the second pregnancy taking successfully.
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