Multiple birth

A multiple birth is when more than one human baby results from a single pregnancy. The most common form of multiple birth is twins (two babies), but cases of triplets (three), quadruplets (four), quintuplets (five), sextuplets (six), septuplets (seven) and octuplets (eight) have all been recorded with all siblings being born alive. There are no known instances of live births of nonuplets (nine), decaplets (ten), undecaplets (eleven) and dodecaplets (twelve). Pregnancies and births of nonuplets have been reported, but there are no known surviving babies.

Multiple births can occur either naturally (the woman ovulates multiple eggs or the fertilized egg splits into two) or as the result of infertility treatments (several embryos are usually implanted to compensate for their lower viability). For reasons that are unknown, the older a woman is, the more likely she is to naturally have a multiple birth.

There are two types of multiple births, fraternal and identical. Identical siblings arise where one egg is fertilised and the resulting zygote splits into more than one embryo. Identical siblings therefore have the same genetic material. Fraternal siblings result from the fertilisation and implantation of more than one egg, so fraternal siblings are not genetically identical.

The number of multiple births has increased over the last decades. For example, in Canada, between 1979 and 1999, the number of multiple birth babies increased 35%. Most of the increase can probably attributed to using in vitro fertilisation techniques.

Recent increases over the last few years in the number of multiple births have also provoked concern; the greater the number of babies in a single pregnancy, the more likely they are to have a low birth weight, to be born prematurely and to consequently suffer medical problems. For example, in 1999, 53% of babies in multiple births were premature, compared to 7% of singletons. [1] There is also a higher rate of stillbirths for multiples than for singletons.

List of famous multiple births

• The Dionne quintuplets (born on May 28, 1934) were the first quintuplets known to survive their infancy.
• The Rosenkowitz sextuplets (born on January 11, 1974 in Cape Town, South Africa) were the first sextuplets known to survive their infancy.
• The Walton sextuplets (born on November 11, 1983 in Liverpool) were the first sextuplets born in the UK known to survive their infancy.
• The Frustaci septuplets (born on May 21, 1985) were the first septuplets to be born in the United States. Only three babies survived.
• The Dilley sextuplets (born on May 25, 1993 in Indianapolis)
• The McCaughey septuplets (born on November 19, 1997) were world's first surviving set of septuplets.
• The Chukwu octuplets (born in December 1998 in Houston). The smallest of the octuplets, Odera, died a week after birth.

External links

• Articles on multiple births