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A 19-year-old Brazilian woman gave birth to twins with different biological fathers. She had sex with two different men on the same day.
When the twins were nine months old, the mom began to wonder who the dad was and had one paternity test done. It was a match for one child.
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The mom said, “I remembered that I had had sex with another man and called him to take the test, which was positive. I didn’t know this could happen. They are very similar.”
Dr. Tulio Franco said, “It is possible to happen when two eggs from the same mother are fertilized by different men. The babies share the mother’s genetic material, but they grow in different placentas.”
Although Dr. Franco admitted you could see a situation like this in his life as it’s “one in a million,” although Dr. Keith Eddleman claimed it is more common than you would think.
Meanwhile, the twins, who are now 16 months old, are currently looked after by just one of the fathers, their mom told Globo. It’s unclear if the other plays any role in their lives.
But these unique twins aren’t the first to score international headlines. In 2015, a judge ruled that a New Jersey man only had to pay child support for one of two twins — because he only fathered one of them.
During the controversial case, DNA expert Karl-Hans Wurzinger’s testimony cited an academic study he published in 1997 that found that different fathers occurs in about one out of every 13,000 reported paternity cases involving twins.
“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.”
