TWINS EXPL AINED
Why do people have multiple babies in a single pregnancy?
WORDS AILSA HARVEY
When more than one baby is born from a single uterus, it’s known as a multiple pregnancy. This can occur in the form of two babies, called twins, and even rarer, three (triplets), four (quadruplets) and so on. The highest recorded number of human babies born in a single pregnancy that survived is nine.
Sometimes, twins and other multiple pregnancies include babies that look exactly the same. These are identical twins, which largely share the same DNA, as opposed to fraternal twins, which are genetically distinct just like regular siblings. Identical and fraternal are the most well-known twin types, but other kinds of twins are much rarer.