Twins
When people have twins, we tend to think of two babies being born at the same time, but this isn’t always the case. A woman in China gave birth to her son’s twin brother, ten years after he was born. It sounds hard to believe, but in-vitro fertilization has made situations like this possible.
The mother – referred to as Ms Wang – recently gave birth to a baby boy using an embryo that had spent the last ten years frozen. He was conceived in the same round of IVF as her older son, technically making them twins despite the ten year age gap.
After her IVF treatment, one embryo was implanted, and the rest were frozen, giving her the chance to give birth to her new child, nicknamed ‘Tong Tong’, on June 16th, weighing 7.7lbs when he arrived into the world.
Ms Wang used the same professional for both pregnancies and both children, and it’s been reported that despite now being 41 years old, her second pregnancy was straightforward and without complications just like her first.
Same Doctor
The hospital confirmed that the two children are twins, biologically speaking, and noted a number of similarities between both pregnancies and births: “The same doctor did the test tube operation, the same doctor did the cesarean section operation, the two babies were the same batch of embryos, the same sex, the same weight, were also born in June,” said a spokesperson for the hospital.
IVF has come a long way in the last forty years, since Louise Brown became the first baby born through the treatment in 1978. Since then, cases like Ms Wang’s have appeared occasionally, as embryos can survive being frozen for up to 55 years in some cases, although this is rare – a few years is more common, so there are likely to be even more parents out there with similar stories.
Coming into the world through IVF, these children had a better start to life than those siblings found abandoned outside the same apartment in Orlando in subsequent years. For more weird stories like these, check out some of our other posts!
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