This Queer Couple Gave Birth to Their Kids Days Apart From Each Other

Like many married couples, wives Karina Rincon and Kelly Mesa wanted to start a family. After tying the knot back in 2017, the two biomedical engineers decided that to increase their chances of being able to give birth to kids, both of them would try using at-home insemination kits and a sperm donor they found online in the hopes that at least one of them would wind-up getting pregnant.

Well, as it turns out, the at-home kits were more effective than they thought, because Karina AND Kelly both got pregnant, and now the two are proud parents to "almost twins" Sophie and Leo.

"People told us that we would kill each other being two pregnant women in the same house, with all those hormones flying around but, actually, it was great to go through this with the love of my life, who completely understood how I was feeling," Karina said in an interview with Metro about her experience.

"Growing up, I hadn't thought I wanted children," said Kelly. "I wanted to focus on my career and studying instead. But Karina changed all that. She has always wanted to be a mother, and I knew she'd make a fantastic one. My love for her changed my mind."

According to Metro, the couple met in Venezuela when the two were attending school, but it wasn't until the two both moved to Miami in 2013 that the two reconnected and a beautiful, loving relationship started to bloom. They kept their relationship a secret from their families, but they eventually came out a little before their 2017 wedding.

"Whenever I'd hear Kelly talking about boyfriends, I'd feel almost jealous and started to realize that it was because I had romantic feelings for her," Karina recalls. (Both she and Kelly were dating men prior to their relationship and marriage.) "She moved around a lot but, eventually, we found ourselves in the same city when we both moved to Miami. I was so nervous, as I had no idea how she would take it, but I had to tell her how I felt. Thankfully, she felt the same."

Fast-forward to post-wedding life in 2018, and the two decided that they wanted to start a family, but couldn't afford the high costs associated with trying to get pregnant with the help of a fertility clinic. After a rigorous screening process to find a sperm donor online and with the help of an insemination kit that only cost $89, the two both decided to try to get pregnant before moving to Los Angeles after Kelly got offered a new job. After taking multiple tests to see whether the at-home insemination kits worked or not, both got the news that they were both expecting--and the rest is now history!

"We both understood how the other was feeling," Karina (who gave birth to Sophie three days after Kelly gave birth to Leo in July of 2019) said of literally getting to share her whole pregnancy with her loved one at her side. "It was nothing like it would have been if we'd had babies with men, where one of us wouldn't be facing the limitations and challenges of pregnancy. The only difficult thing was sharing a bed with two ginormous bellies and both of us wanting to pee every five minutes."

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