Woman Delivers Twins Who Have Two Different Fathers

A New Jersey woman has given birth to twins who have two different fathers. This was revealed after the woman, identified only as T.M., applied for child support, but it was discovered that the man she took to court as the father of her twins, only fathered one of them.

The case took root when the mother told the Passaic County Board of Social Services in the course of applying for benefits that A.S., her romantic partner, had fathered her twins, The Law Journal reported. The board, in turn, filed an application to establish that he is indeed the father and force him to pay child support for the twins. But the woman's claim slowly fell apart. She revealed in testimony that she had had s*x with a second, unidentified man within a week of having s*x with her romantic partner, so a DNA test was ordered. And when the results came back, it was revealed that the two men had each fathered one of the twins, who are now toddlers.

The man originally described as the twins' father, identified in court documents only as A.S., will now have to pay child support only for the toddler who a DNA test showed was reliably his own. Judge Mohammed accepted the results after testimony from Karl-Hans Wurzinger, the laboratory director of the Identity Testing Division at Laboratory Corporation of America, The Law Journal reported. Dr. Wurzinger, who has published a study saying that one in 13,000 reported paternity cases involved twins with separate fathers, testified that this was one of those rare cases: The woman's twins were fertilized by different fathers during the same menstrual cycle. Dr. Jennifer Wu, an obstetrician-gynecologist at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan, called it a case of superfecundation, a rare phenomenon classically illustrated in medical textbooks with a black baby and a white baby who are twins.

Dr. Wu told the New York Times that a sperm can be viable for up to five days. So if the mother in this case had s*x with one of the men, ovulated, and then had s*x with the other — all within the course of just under a week — one man's sperm could have fertilized one egg, while the other's fertilized another.