A 19-year-old Brazilian woman gave birth to twins after having sexual relations with two different men on the same day. As the first birthday of the twins approached, she began to question who their father might be, prompting her to undergo DNA testing to determine the paternity of her children.
The unnamed woman initially suspected one of the two men to be the father of the twins, so she collected DNA from him; however, the result was only positive for one of the children.
Twins with different fathers of the 19-year-old Brazilian mother.
“I remember having sexual relations with another man and called him for a test, and the result was positive. I was very surprised by this outcome. I had no idea this could happen. They look so similar,” the young mother shared.
Thus, this 19-year-old woman gave birth to twins with different fathers after having sexual relations with two men on the same day in Mineiros, Brazil. While it may sound strange, medical experts confirm that this phenomenon is entirely possible.
Dr. Tulio Jorge Franco, the attending physician of the young mother, told local news outlet Globo: “It can occur when two eggs from the same mother are fertilized by different men. The children share the mother’s genetic material, but they develop in separate placentas.”
According to the journal Biomedica, superfecundation is an extremely rare phenomenon that occurs when a second egg is released in the same menstrual cycle and is fertilized by sperm from another man during separate sexual intercourse.
“According to Dr. Tulio Jorge Franco: “After conducting paternity tests, both men with whom the woman had sexual relations were found to be fathers of one child each. Dr. Franco admitted that he never thought he would encounter such a case in his lifetime because it has a probability of one in a million,” and he confirmed that there are only about 20 similar cases reported worldwide.
Meanwhile, the twins, now 16 months old, are currently being cared for by only one father, according to their mother in a local report by Globo. It remains unclear if the other man plays any role in their lives.
However, these twins are not the first twins with different fathers in the world. In 2015, a judge ruled that a man in New Jersey, USA, was only required to pay child support for one of the twins because he was the father of only one child.
DNA expert Karl-Hans Wurzinger cited an academic study he published in 1997, which showed that different fathers occur in about one in 13,000 reported paternity cases involving twins.
“Since an egg can survive from 12 to 48 hours and sperm can last from 7 to 10 days, there is about a week for potential overlap and fertilization of two eggs by two sperm from two separate acts of intercourse with men,” Dr. Keith Eddleman, director of obstetrics at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, told CNN at the time of the testing.
“It’s more common than we think,” Eddleman added. “In many situations, you would never know because there’s no reason to conduct paternity tests on twins.”
