A Brazilian woman from Minerios in Goias has made headlines with her extraordinary case of giving birth to twins with different biological fathers. The 19-year-old, who prefers to remain anonymous, recently underwent a paternity test when her twins turned eight months old, confirming the rare occurrence she had claimed all along.
A young woman from Brazil, who was 19 years old, had two babies after having sex with two men on the same day. When the twins were getting close to their first birthdays, she started to feel unsure about who their father really was. To get a definite answer, she decided to take a paternity test. The news outlet Globo reported this story.
Newsflash
At first, the woman suspected that only one of the two men she had been with was the father of the twins. So, she gathered a sample of DNA from him to do the paternity test. However, the test results showed that he was only the father of one of the twins.
Newsflash
“I remembered that I had had sex with another man and called him to take the test, which was positive,” the new mom, who asked not to be identified, told the outlet. “I was surprised by the results. I didn’t know this could happen. They are very similar.”
Although this phenomenon is astonishing, it is important to note that it is not impossible.
“It is possible to happen when two eggs from the same mother are fertilized by different men,” Dr. Tulio Jorge Franco, the woman’s attending physician, told local news outlet Globo. “The babies share the mother’s genetic material, but they grow in different placentas.”
iStockphoto
According to the journal Biomedica, heteropaternal superfecundation is an exceptionally uncommon occurrence. It happens when a woman releases a second egg during her menstrual cycle, which is then fertilized by the sperm of a different man through separate sexual encounters.
Dr. Franco, who was taken aback, confessed that he never thought he would encounter a situation like this during his life. He described it as incredibly rare, with odds of happening being only “one in a million.” He mentioned that there are about 20 similar cases documented worldwide.
The twins, who are now 16 months old, are being taken care of by one of the fathers, according to the mother’s statement to Globo. It is uncertain whether the other father plays any role in their lives.
These extraordinary twins are not the first to make headlines internationally. In 2015, a judge ruled that a man from New Jersey would only be required to provide child support for one of his twin children because he was the biological father of only one of them
During the controversial case, DNA expert Karl-Hans Wurzinger referred to a study he published in 1997, which revealed that different fathers in twin cases occurred in approximately one out of every 13,000 reported paternity cases.
“Since an egg has a life span of 12 to 48 hours and a sperm is viable for seven to 10 days, there is about a week’s time for potential overlap and the fertilization of two eggs by two sperm from two separate acts of intercourse with different men,” Dr. Keith Eddleman, director of obstetrics at New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital, told CNN at the time of the trial.
“It is more common than we think,” Eddleman continued. “In many situations, you would never know because there is no reason to do a paternity test on twins.”