After two years of unsuccessful attempts, Alina Luca, from London, thought she couldn’t have another baby. However, a rare phenomenon called sᴜᴘᴇʀꜰᴇᴛᴀᴛɪᴏɴ happened to her.
Alina Luca, 30, from London, England, is the mother of a 9-year-old girl and wanted to raise the family along with her partner, Rick Carmea. They spent two years trying, without success, until they gave up. But exactly one month after giving up hope, she found out she was pregnant and it wasn’t an ordinary pregnancy. Alina became pregnant twice in the same week.
After carrying out tests, doctors said the mother had only a 5% chance of becoming pregnant but was “contemplated” with a rare phenomenon called sᴜᴘᴇʀꜰᴇᴛᴀᴛɪᴏɴ, which is when a woman becomes pregnant while she is already pregnant. On March 15, she gave birth to two girls, Ellie and Millie, who are not, technically, twins, although they shared their mother’s ᴜᴛᴇʀᴜs over the course of nine months.
“I got pregnant when I was already pregnant. I didn’t think it was possible,” she said. “We found that they were ᴄᴏɴᴄᴇɪᴠᴇᴅ a week apart because of the size difference. It’s a miracle this happened to me.”
“After I processed the information and did some research, I was really sʜᴏᴄᴋᴇᴅ and I was like, ‘Wow, it really happened and it really happened to me. It’s amazing,” she declared.
The two girls were born healthy, one minute apart. “I felt like I was over the moon when I held them for the first time,” the mother said.
Pregnancy was a dream, but carrying two babies at once was a challenge. “I am small. My skin was so tight and I had so many stretch marks that it felt like my belly was going to explode soon. I thought my back was going to break because my belly was too big,” said Alina, who now has an Instagram page to raise awareness of sᴜᴘᴇʀꜰᴇᴛᴀᴛɪᴏɴ. “When I tell the story, people look at me and think I’m crazy and wonder how that was possible. If someone told me before, I think I would do the same,” she concluded.
What is sᴜᴘᴇʀꜰᴇᴛᴀᴛɪᴏɴ?
Although super rare, getting pregnant while pregnant is a real possibility. That is, a woman can experience a double dose of pregnancy from two different conceptions, separated by up to a few weeks. Sᴜᴘᴇʀꜰᴇᴛᴀᴛɪᴏɴ happens when a pregnant mother continues to ᴏᴠᴜʟᴀᴛᴇ and has unprotected s.ᴇx in the meantime. The second pregnancy can happen between 1 and 4 weeks after the first, but either way, babies must be born at the same time, just like twins.