Can Women Become Pregnant While Pregnant?

If you’re already pregnant, it probably never crossed your mind that you might get pregnant again. Well, we don’t want to scare you, but it turns out that you can still get pregnant even if you already are. 

The fertilization creates a zygote, which then divides into a group of cells called an embryo. The embryo grows into a fetus after about 10 weeks, which then keeps developing until birth.

Even “normal” pregnancies can take a lot out of you, so this sort of double pregnancy is a completely different beast. The name for this phenomenon is superfetation, and it’s when different offspring develop in different stages during the same gestational period. Basically, another egg gets fertilized while the first is already growing inside the womb. 

This phenomenon is much more common in animals like rodents, rabbits, sheep, minks, and badgers than in humans. It’s extremely rare for superfetation to occur in humans, and there are only 10 documented cases.