In a shocking paternity case out of New Jersey, a judge has uncovered that a woman actually birthed twins with two different fathers. The woman was apparently suing a former partner for child support, which resulted in DNA testing of her twin 2-year-olds which proved that only one of the children was his. The woman also admitted in court that she did in fact have sex with two different men within a week's time.
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According to CNN, twins with two different fathers is considered a rare phenomenon even though it occurs in around 1 in 13,000 twin pregnancies. This occurs when a woman releases two eggs during a single ovulatory cycle and has intercourse with two men in the same week, during her fertile phase. Since eggs can live for 12 to 48 hours and sperm for as many as seven to 10 days, it's completely possible for each egg to be fertilized by a different man's sperm during a single cycle. This phenomenon is referred to superfecundation and twins conceived under these circumstances are referred to as bipaternal or heteropaternal.
However, releasing more than one egg only occurs in only 5 to 10 percent of cycles and often still ends up in a singleton pregnancy. So even the 1 in 13,000 statistic sounds like way more often than most would imagine.
Honestly, I never even considered that something like this might be possible and I can't help but wonder what even prompted anyone to be suspicious in the aforementioned case. Was the man just unsure about paternity in general and was concerned that neither of the twins were his? Or was it just one of the twins that he was supsicious about? Personally, I hate to even think that so many women are promiscuous enough to be in this situation, but CNN also reports that the medical community believes that superfecundation occurs more now than it did 50 years ago. ¡Ay! I don't even know what to say to that besides, ladies, be careful who you sleep with and when. Better yet, just use protection.
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