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This week, the New York Times ran an article about the present-day era of twins and how the run of multiples will peter out as technology becomes more advanced and single-embryo transfers become the preferred choice of reproductive endocrinologists in America as they already are the preferred choice in many clinics overseas.
The author, a parent of twins, touches on the obsession the outside world has with noticing and discussing multiples. The author offers this simple explanation for the abundance of twins in New York City.
Of course, there’s nothing freakish or remarkable about how so many twins came to crowd the preschools of New York City. Older mothers are more prone to throwing off two eggs at once, but they’re also more likely to have trouble conceiving, and opting for in vitro fertilization. (The number of twins nationwide has increased by 65 percent in the past two decades).
Beth Kohl covers a similar thought in her recent book, Embryo Culture. She attends a fertility clinic celebration at the Chicago Botanical Garden. As she enters, a man asks her if a twin convention is taking place that day at the garden and when she answers that it is a fertility clinic event, he responds, "I figured it had to be something like that...I knew this wasn't normal--so many of them."
At first, she too wonders about the number of twins appearing at the event and the recurrence of multiples in the infertility community. But her focus is not on the multiples themselves but on the way the outside world gloms onto the idea of multiples as one of their stereotypical beliefs about fertility treatments.
And all that talk of an epidemic of multiples is, if you ask me, prejudiced. IVFist. You know, a cloaked bias against it or the people who undergo it or the doctors who perform it. As if we choose to have fertility issues! As if having children this way makes them less pure and us, their parents, less worthy or capable. Like the children equivalent of the mail-order bride.
The New York Times article received an interesting response from the twin-parenting community, especially since the author herself does not make any concrete statement about how she feels about the end of this era--though her thoughts are contained within the language she chooses. Instead, she simply comments that the current trend will probably change and how will this fifteen year span of multiple births affect both singletons and multiples down the line. The article is also brief, asking more questions and posing this idea more than it attempts to answer it or provide factual information for the reader to use when forming an opinion. One walks away from the article feeling as if they've had a snack of chips rather than a meal of substance.
As a parent of twins, I was truly of two minds with the idea posed in the article. On one hand, I know too well the health risks and prematurity that can come with a twin gestation. I was still vomiting daily up until the day I delivered--at 33 weeks--twins who were IUGR. One only needs to click through a few blogs on the required reading list below to see the long-term affects prematurity (a very real risk for multiple births) can have on children as well as their parents.
And in the face of that known risk, the idea of multiple births dropping off in recurrence made me worry about the treatment my children would receive as well as feel a strange sadness over what other people would miss out on in terms of the experience of multiples--all risks be damned. Because pregnancy itself is a risk and in my own case, I could have had the same IUGR and prematurity with a singleton birth. It may speak volumes about how people will rationalize risk within their own mind. But, perhaps, I see the benefits of multiples and the joy of multiples outweighing the risks of multiples when taken in context with the risk of any pregnancy.
What were your thoughts, reading the article?
Just a small smattering of my favourite multiples blogs:
- Micro Preemie Twins: not an infertility blog, but an excellent parenting twins blog that always makes me think.
- Everyday Stranger: parenting newborn twins.
- Snickollet: parenting twins after the loss of her husband.
- Heeeeere Storkey, Storkey!: premature twins who just came home from the NICU.
- My Dear Watson:
