Know what heteropaternal superfecundation means?
It’s when a set of twins have two different dads, as a Chinese woman found out recently when it was discovered that her twin babies are actually half-siblings.
It turned out that she had had a one-night stand around the time the babies were conceived, meaning her husband only fathered one of the kids.
The revelation came to light when the new mum, from Xiamen, went to register her newborns and asked for a paternity test, reports AsiaOne.
Her husband had become suspicious of her as he felt that one of the babies didn’t look like him.
He claimed that one of the babies had different eyes, nose and mouth to him.
Paternity tests are actually standard practice for registering a baby’s birth in the city but this one came back with results that neither the woman nor her husband could have expected.
At first the woman accused her husband of tampering with the results but she eventually confessed to having slept with another man.
Cases like this are very rare – the odds of having twins by different fathers is around one in 13,000.
Two separate eggs would had to have been fertilised by the sperm within days of each other.
“They’re fraternal twins,” said a spokesperson for the Fujian Zhengtai Judicial Authentication Centre in Xiamen where the story came to light.
“A very uncommon and rare case.”
