BioNews: A recent spate of articles celebrating the birth of an IVF 'twin' five years after her brother left me perplexed. Why was this news, when embryo freezing has been in use since the mid-1980s? And as the children were not identical, by what definition were they twins?
For the first question, I still have no answer. . . . The press called the children 'twins' because, like naturally-occurring fraternal twins, they were produced from the simultaneous fertilisation of two separate eggs. In this sense, twinship is based on the technological mimicry of a natural process.
However, if we consider all the fertilised embryos created from a single cycle of egg retrieval we would logically be talking about more than twins. In this case the two children become quintuplets, as the cycle produced five embryos. And what about two embryos conceived in the same Petri dish, but carried by different women? Where one couple offer their 'spare' embryos to another, would those two children be separated twins? Both scenarios lead us into areas which are deeply uncomfortable.
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