Читать книгу Double Trouble: Twins and How to Survive Them - Emma Mahony - Страница 19

The ‘mix-up-in-the-lab’ story is recycled again and again whenever the latest fertility scare happens. This is a variation on every woman’s irrational fear that her baby will be switched by mistake when the nurses are chatting abstractedly over a cup of tea. This fear is as old as the hills. My mother admits to being so scared by it that she insisted on having a home birth for her first born, back in 1961. When my 11lb (ouch!) big brother finally appeared, I think few would have mixed him up with some 5lb weakling.

There are three twin mix-up tales in the IVF history books. The first was when a white mother gave birth to black twins in the summer of 2002 here in Britain. The sperm was wrongly mixed with the woman’s eggs after a laboratory error in an NHS clinic, and the legal outcome determining who are the parents has yet to be settled.

The other two happened elsewhere in the world. The first was in 1993 in Holland where twin boys, one white and one black, were born to Willem and Wilma Stuart after two samples of sperm became accidentally mixed before being used to fertilize Wilma’s eggs. The biological father made no attempts to gain custody of his twin, but the family keeps in touch in the event that his biological son may want to meet him one day.

The second case happened in 1998 in New York when two lots of embryos were mixed and both women, Donna Fasano and Deborah Rogers, were implanted with what they took to be their own embryos. Only one of the pregnancies turned out to be successful, and the mother had one black and one white twin. There followed a difficult legal battle, leading to the black twin being handed over to his biological mother. Despite the recrimination between the parents and the hospital, the now four-year-old twins still visit each other.