It sounds as though you may have heard this story on a television talk show like Jerry Springer, but it has transpired in a courtroom in Passaic County in New Jersey, United States. According to USA Today, this is only the third case ever recorded in the country’s history, where a woman has been proven to have given birth to a set of twins where there are two different fathers involved.
What began as a routine paternity test, soon become one for the text books as the woman’s claim for support from the first man fell apart.
When she applied for public assistance for the twins who were born in 2013, she named one of the men as the father of the children.
After admitting that she had sex with another man within one week of having sex with the man she had named, a paternity test was ordered to determine exactly which of the men the father of the twins was.
The DNA test revealed what the New York Times referred to as "a tangled web of love and biology”. With 99.9% certainty, the test proved that the first man had only fertilised one egg.
The woman had sex with the other man during the same menstrual cycle, and both men were ruled to have fathered a child each. As such, Judge Sohail Mohammed decided that each man must contribute to child support only for the child which he had fathered, equalling US$28 a week.
This phenomenon is said to be a type of superfecundation, a rare occurrence which is often illustrated in medical textbooks with cases where one of the babies is black and the other white.
Since a sperm has the potential to be viable for about five days, if the woman had sex with one of the men, ovulated, and then had sex with the second man – all before a week had whizzed by, then each of the men could have fertilised an egg. And it appears that this is exactly what has happened.
According to the New York Times, an obstetrician-gynaecologist at Lenox Hill Hospital, Jennifer Wu, explained that this phenomenon has been harnessed for use in in assistive reproductive technologies. One such example of the application of this is where two homosexual men in a partnership contribute to a pregnancy.
“That’s why we’re seeing it more often than we were in the past,” explained Dr Wu. “When we were relying on nature and women who have more than one sexual partner in the same cycle around the time of ovulation”
According to Yahoo Parenting, an obstetrician at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City, Shari Brasner, suggests that this may happen more often than we think, or at least more often than reported because “paternity isn’t always contested so there are probably scenarios in which this has happened but nobody knows,” says Brasner.
“You don’t blink an eye at fraternal twins looking different after all”.
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