Geminis usually attract quite a lot of attention. Anyone who walks with a pram with twins can be sure of getting a lot of attention. Identical twins in particular are often in the spotlight. Although twins are seen as an attraction in themselves, there are a number of twins that attract even more attention.
Twins
There are identical and fraternal twins. Fraternal twins are created when two eggs are fertilized. Identical twins are produced from one egg and one sperm. The chance of having twins in the Netherlands is approximately 1 in 100 pregnancies. In recent decades, the number of twins has increased significantly because women are having children at an increasingly older age and because IVF is being used more often. Both factors increase the chance of having twins. Although having or having twins is already quite special, there are a number of special twins in the world. They have characteristics that are even less common than being twins itself.
Skin color
There is a one in a million chance that twins will be bicolored. In England in 2012, twins were born, one girl was white and the other was black. This can occur when two separate eggs are fertilized by two different sperm cells. In that case, the genes that determine the children’s skin color may be different. The father of these twins had Irish and Jamaican roots. The mother had Irish, African and Jamaican roots. Her father was white. It is common for brothers and sisters to have different skin colors, but for twins it is very special. It was not the first time that bicolor twins were born. The chance of such twins is 1 in a million pregnancies.
Twins that are not the same age
Twins are usually the same age because they are born close together. There is usually about half an hour between the birth of the two children. However, this is not always the case. In June 2014, twins were born in Boston with an age difference of no less than 24 days. When the mother of these twins was 24 weeks pregnant, she went into labor. Despite attempts to delay the delivery, a baby boy weighing 745 grams was born. However, his brother liked it in his mother’s womb and decided to stay a while. The contractions stopped after the first birth and it was only 24 days later that his brother decided to leave his mother’s body. He was a lot bigger and heavier than his brother. It is very rare for a labor to stop once it has started.
However, the age difference of 24 days, as described above, is nothing compared to the twins who are 2.5 years apart in age. The father was diagnosed with a testicular tumor at the age of 26. If he wanted to have children, he had to have his sperm frozen. This happened in 2007. In 2009 the tumor returned and the couple decided to start IVF treatment so that the man had a reason to fight for. In 2010 a boy was born. Then, in 2012, a girl was born from the same frozen sperm. The children are very similar and Dad’s illness has receded to the point where he can enjoy both.
Abnormalities in the mother
Normally every woman has one uterus. If a twin pregnancy occurs, the children grow together in this womb. Fraternal twins each have their own placenta and amniotic sac. One then speaks of dichorionic twins. There are also dichorionic identical twins, but usually identical twins share the placenta and each have their own amniotic sac. These types of twins are called monochorionic. In 2011, an American woman gave birth to twins born from two wombs. Having two uteruses is already a rare condition and is called uterus didelphys. The woman only found out about this when she was already seven weeks pregnant. The chance that twins will be born from this is one in five million. The children were born healthy. In 2014, twins were born in Ohio in the United States who shared their mother’s amniotic fluid and placenta, known as mono-mono twins. That was already special, but the way they came into the world was even more so. The two girls were holding hands. They were born by caesarean section.
A special Siamese twins
One in 200,000 births is of conjoined twins. Siamese twins are always identical. In these twins, the embryo is not completely split. They have a very low chance of survival. Conjoined twins can be connected in various ways and in some cases they are surgically separated. The possibility of this depends on the degree of fusion and whether they share essential organs. In 2014, Siamese twins were born in Australia with one body and one head, but two brains and two faces. They also shared their bodies. This condition is called diprosopus and there are only a few dozen cases of it known in the world. The twins were only nineteen days old.
