Twins aren’t twins
Filed under: Pregnancy and Birth, Siblings, 3-6 months, Infant / First year, High-risk pregnancy, C-section
Imagine being on the pill and then finding out you're pregnant. That would be quite a shock, I'm sure. Now imagine it happens twice. I suppose one might start to get a bit upset with the pharmaceutical company. But what if it happened twice, in three weeks? That's what happened to Amelia Spence who got pregnant not once but twice in the course of three weeks, all while on the pill.It turns out that in rare cases, a woman's body may continue releasing eggs for fertilization after she has already become pregnant. This is called superfetation and occurs in some animals, but is very rare in humans. It has got to be even more rare when the mother is taking contraceptive pills at the time she gets pregnant.
Ame and Lia, now five months old, were born just minutes apart, but were conceived three weeks apart. Doctors spotted the difference in development early on. "We looked at the screen and the doctor pointed out that one foetus still looked like a blob, whereas the other had four visible limbs. It was such a marked difference," said Miss Spence. "One foetus was 12 weeks old, whilst they said the other was three weeks behind, at nine weeks old. I had become pregnant twice on two separate occasions."Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments