A 20-year-old Bangladeshi woman has given birth to a set of twins, just 26 days after her first child was born.

That might seem impossible, but it is – in actual fact – just really really unlikely.

The woman, it turns out, actually has two wombs instead of one, meaning that she was having two pregnancies concurrently, for a while at least.

Arifa Sultana brought her first child, a son, into the world in late February, according to Dr Sheila Poddar, one of the gynaecologists at Ad-Din Hospital in Dhaka.

Both mother and child were healthy, and the delivery was totally normal, and she was released from another hospital in the city afterwards.

However, she turned up at Ad-Din less than four weeks after that complaining that she wasn’t feeling too great.

Dr Poddar said: “She came to the hospital complaining of lower abdominal pain.”

At this point, the doctors performed an ultrasound and spotted that the pain was because she was pregnant with twins.

She hadn’t had an ultrasound for the first pregnancy, so they’d never have spotted it.

So, she’s got a condition called uterus didelphys. That means that her first born child and the twins were both conceived and grown within two completely separate wombs.

As we’ve said, not impossible, just really unlikely.

Dr S.N. Basu, the head of obstetrics and gynaecology at Max Healthcare Hospital in India’s New Delhi said: “It is not very common to have two uteruses.

“When the uterus develops, it comes from two tubes, and those tubes fuse together. For some women, the fusion does not occur, and the dividing wall does not dissolve.”

Because of the complex nature of the pregnancy, Dr Poddar had to perform an emergency Caesarean section to deliver the two babies.

She now has another boy, and a girl. Everybody is doing fine, too.

Dr Poddar continued: “All three children are safe and healthy.

“The mother is also fine.”

Well, that’s good news.

Just to breakdown how unusual this is, uterus didelphys is an incredibly rare congenital abnormality, and for two pregnancies to occur at the same time is – quite literally – one in a million.

It’s even less likely that this wouldn’t be discovered until the birth.

Dr Basu continued: “From rural areas, people don’t know what is wrong with them.

“They don’t know how many children they are pregnant with and sometimes whether they are pregnant also.”

Fascinating stuff, nonetheless.