It’s not as easy as ordering ‘a Beyoncé’, writes Marcelle Abrahams
BEYONCÉ’S pregnant with twins and the rest of the world goes gaga. It’s as if the idea of twins is a new concept to us. Soon, couples will be visiting fertility experts, begging them to do a “Beyoncé” – it’s a case of “I’ll have what she’s having”. If only it was that easy.
According to the latest statistics, the odds of having twins are far greater than any other type of multiple births – about 90% of all multiples are twins; the remaining 10% are triplets, quadruplets and quintuplets.
In recent years, there has been a significant increase in the birth of twins due to advances made in fertility treatments and assisted-reproduction technology.
It really comes down to how the ovum (egg) is fertilised: to form identical or monozygotic twins, one fertilised egg splits and develops into two babies with exactly the same genetic information. For fraternal or dizygotic twins, two eggs are fertilised by two sperm and produce two genetically unique children.
“Usually, the discovery is made during an ultrasound at any time between six and 20 weeks,” say Katrina Bowman and Louise Ryan, authors of
“Ultrasound scans for a naturally conceived twin pregnancy are usually done between 18 and 20 weeks,” they note. Both mothers of twins, the book details their personal journeys of conceiving via in vitro fertilisation (IVF).
If you’ve conceived twins naturally, the big question is, always: do twins run in the family?
Non-identical twins tend to run in families, whereas identical twins don’t. Fertility experts believe that a gene that the mother carries makes her more likely to release two or more eggs during ovulation, and it’s this gene that runs in the family. The outcome can be bizarre. Sanju Bhagat, 36, was rushed to hospital after his belly become bloated in 1999. Doctors found that his twin was trapped in his body. How, you might ask: by attaching to Bhagat’s blood supply, the twin had survived as a parasite post-birth for more than 30 years.
Dutch couple Wilma and Willem Stuart opted for IVF after years of struggling to conceive naturally. In 1993, Wilma became pregnant with twins.
When the babies were born, one had darker skin – the result of a lab error that combined another man’s sperm with her egg.
A school in northern Illinois broke the Guinness world record for most sets of twins in the same academic year at a single school, with 24 sets of twins in Grade 5.
Mother to Cooper, six, and twins Rocco and Lula, four, East Coast radio DJ Jane Linley Thomas knows all too well the issues parents of twins face.
“I did not expect to be pregnant with twins, and it was very overwhelming when I first found out,” she says.
The pregnancy itself didn’t come without its hurdles either.
“At the end, I couldn’t sit in the bath, I couldn’t drive, I couldn’t get into the shower, I couldn’t get out of bed. It was a STAR TWINS: Recording artist Mariah Carey and her children, Moroccan Scott and Monroe Cannon, attend the ceremony for the unveiling of her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in Los Angeles, California in 2015. very laboured pregnancy.”
But nothing compares to the feeling of having those warm little bodies handed to you for the first time, she says. “Lying in that delivery ward and having them passed to me, one in each arm, there’re just no words to describe it.”
And her advice for parents-to-be of twins?
“I think the advice that I would give is advice that my mom gave me, that you can only eat an elephant one mouthful at a time!
“The way that I dealt with it was to kind of micromanage, thinking about the day and the next day and not thinking about the week and the year because it would then completely overwhelm me.”
She explains that there was no such thing as any kind of luxuries, such as sterilising dummies: “To this day, they’ve never had a warm bottle of milk,” she muses.
“When you start making life really cushy when you’ve got more than one child, you can end up being a non-tipped waiter for the rest of your life.”
Maybe the most important piece of advice she offers is to “try and make decisions that aren’t going to kill them, but make an environment that isn’t too taxing in order to keep up”.
Famous twins
You can’t mention identical twins without these famous Hollywood names coming up. TV viewers fell in love with their adorable antics in
Not to be outdone by their famous parents, the duo recently turned eight with personalities as different as night and day.
Five-year-old twins Moroccan and Monroe are so fabulous that they don’t even need last names and chances are they are bound for stardom with parents like Mariah Carey and Nick Cannon.
The electro-hop music duo are arguably SA’s most famous musical twins better known as Locnville.
Popular radio and TV presenters, the Masina twins even had their own reality show on e.tv.