A Girl Was Born Prematurely, But the Mom Is Still Pregnant Four Weeks Later with Twin Brother
A Girl Was Born Prematurely, But the Mom Is Still Pregnant Four Weeks Later with Twin Brother
Danielle Paull became pregnant with twins. One of the children was born prematurely, at only 24 weeks. The child weighed just 710 grams. That is only one pound and nine ounces! This was an incredibly tiny newborn. The child was immediately incubated at the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at the Randwick Royal Hospital for Women in Sydney, Australia. Danielle was not even able to breastfeed the new baby girl, as breastfeeding could bring on contractions and the other child would be born prematurely, as well.
The other twin remains safely in utero at present, and his parents hope he can remain there for the next 16 weeks, which will make the twins four months apart in age. This is a very rare phenomenon called delayed interval delivery. This sort of delivery can be accomplished if the twins are not identical. Identical twins share a placenta, so one twin cannot survive without the other.
The premature birth procedure is attempted when a mother has a cervix that opens prematurely, which is sometimes the case with multiple fetuses.
The surgeon for this sort of birth cuts the umbilical cord very high so that it contracts back into the uterus. This keeps the delivered child’s placenta from detaching, and the body is tricked into not going into labor again to deliver the other child.
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Kate Hill of Brisbane, Australia has had an even stranger experience with her twins. She and her husband Peter were attempting to conceive a child, but Kate did not become pregnant. She was diagnosed with the polycystic ovarian syndrome, which left her unable to ovulate. Determined to bear a child, she underwent hormonal treatment so that she could ovulate. When she ovulated, she produced two eggs. The ordinary ovulation is one egg released per cycle.
The following incident is anything but ordinary! Kate became pregnant a second time within 10 days. Not only was the second egg released a full 10 days after the first, but Peter’s sperm remained alive for ten days to fertilize the second egg!
Kate and Peter Hill’s experience is so rare that only 10 cases of a second pregnancy occurring while a first conception is ongoing have been documented.
READ ALSO: What Are The Symptoms of Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS) and How To Treat It Naturally!
Women do release more than one egg in a cycle, but doing so is unusual. However, scientists studying genetics are realizing that there may be more possibilities for twinning than first thought. Superfecundation is an example of that.
Superfecundation happens very seldom. A woman releases two eggs and then has sexual relations with two different men within a 24-hour period. A strange case brought a paternity suit in New Jersey presented just such a dilemma.
DNA expert Dr. Karl-Hanz Wurzinger testified during the New Jersey case that T.M.’s twin daughters were fathered by two different men. He wrote a 1997 research study that estimated 1 in 13,000 paternity cases were those of twins with two different fathers.
If the children are of two distinctly different races, such as the New Jersey case, the paternity double is obvious. In most cases, the twins are born and separate paternity is not noticed unless genetic testing becomes involved.
The phenomena of multiple births are fascinating. In an age of embryology and sperm donations, it has become apparent that twins can be conceived days apart, and that two or more genetically different children can grow and develop in the body of one woman. Twins never fail to amaze!
