Mother Learns She Conceived Twice in 5 Days – Her ‘Miracle Babies’ Were Born on the Same Day but Are Technically Not Twins
Photo Courtesy MICHELLE ARCHULETA/Reflect Light Photography
When 25-year-old Odalis Martinez went to get a pregnancy ultrasound in November 2020, she was shocked when her doctor gave her some unexpected information about her pregnancy: not only were two heartbeats detected, indicating two fetuses, but it appeared as if her babies were conceived five days apart.
That’s right! While you may have thought that only animals like cats and dogs could carry multiple fetuses conceived on different days, humans apparently can too. The phenomenon is called superfetation and is reportedly very rare in humans.
Usually, if a woman is pregnant with two babies, they are identical twins or fraternal twins. Identical if one fertilized egg splits in two to create two different fetuses. Fraternal if two eggs are fertilized by a sperm at exactly the same time.
When Martinez heard about her babies’ dates of conception, she knew immediately that they were her “miracle babies.” Martinez and her husband, Antonio, had been wanting a family for a while and had even been pregnant previously. But, unfortunately, Martinez’s last pregnancy ended in a miscarriage, devastating both her and her husband.
Martinez told The Daily Mail that it was only after she had emotionally and physically recovered from her miscarriage that she felt ready to try to get pregnant again. And according to her, she and her husband were trying a lot the month they got pregnant a second time.
When Martinez found out about her two-for-one pregnancy special, she felt that the blessing was a gift from the spirit of her baby who had passed. “‘I was just crying with happiness,” Martinez told The Daily Mail. “I felt like the first baby that we had lost was in the room with me and saying it was going to be okay.”
“Just how easy I was able to conceive, and knowing that I had two babies, I just felt like there was so much light after such a dark place,” she said. “It was the best surprise ever.”
Martinez’s babies, Lilo and Imelda, were born on the same day — August 10, 2021. Lilo, who was conceived first, was born first. Imelda, who was technically five days younger, came second. Oddly enough, Imelda, the “younger” baby, weighed in heavier at 7lbs 3oz compared to her older sister’s 6lbs 12oz weight.
Martinez says that most people mistake her babies for twins, and she finds it easier not to correct them. Apparently, Lilo and Imelda look so much alike that even her husband has trouble telling the babies apart.
“Antonio will have a baby for an hour and be like, ‘Oh Lilo,’ this and that,” she told the Mail. “And I’m like, ‘You have Imelda’ and he will be like ‘What?’ And I’m just there laughing because he was like, ‘Oh my God for a whole hour I thought I had Lilo’.”
The birth of her miracle babies helped Martinez heal from her first pregnancy loss. “I feel like it’s some sort of miracle that I experienced this double pregnancy,” Martinez told the Daily Mail. “Because of our first experience, it made everything during this pregnancy feel so much more special and magical.
This article has been edited for accuracy.
