The woman thought she carrying twins as a surrogate for a Chinese couple.
A surrogate carrying a Chinese couple's baby became pregnant with her own child in an extremely rare medical occurrence known as superfetation.
Jessica Allen initially thought she was carrying twins, she said, after an ultrasound revealed two fetuses in her womb.
“Oh my God,” her husband, Wardell Jasper, told InsideEdition.com Monday. “Can you imagine?”
Allen assumed the transplanted embryo inside her had split, resulting in two offspring. The babies were delivered by cesarean section.
She never saw the twins at the hospital, she said, as they were whisked away to their new parents.
But a month later, as the adoptive couple was preparing to return to China, Allen and Jasper received a text message and a photograph from the mother.
“We were really living and loving life,” Jasper said. The $30,000 fee Allen had been paid for acting as a surrogate had allowed her to be a stay-at-home mom for her two sons.
But the disturbing text said the twins didn’t look like each other. One was much lighter than the other.
DNA testing eventually showed Allen was the biological mother of one of the twins. The other baby carried the adoptive parents’ DNA.
Allen and Jasper were thunderstruck. They said it took them a month of fighting to get custody of the baby boy they now call Malachi.
“They were in separate sacks” in the uterus, Jasper said. “One baby came out black-and-white and one baby came out Chinese,” he said. Allen is white. Jasper is black.
The two babies are also not the same age, Jasper said. His and Allen’s child was about three weeks younger than the other infant.
Superfetation can occur when a pregnant woman continues to ovulate. Jasper said he and his partner did copious amounts of research before finding reports about the rare occurrence. Doctors later confirmed it in their case, he said.
The couple’s other two sons are ages 7 and 2. Malachi is 10 months.
“We’re definitely grateful he’s with us,” said his dad. “He’s walking, he’s trying to talk. He’s smart, he’s goofy and we love him to death.”
