Hence the man she took to court as the father of her twins has been told to pay child support to only one twin after a judge found those twins have two different fathers.
The
ruling came after a woman asked for child support for her twins.
However, according to court documents, DNA testing determined the man
originally cited as the children's father was actually only the
biological father of one of them.
Because of that,
Passaic County Superior
Court Judge Sohail Mohammed ruled in family
court on May 4 that the unnamed defendant would have to pay child
support for the twin he fathered, and he dismissed the unnamed mother's
claim for support of the other child.
Dr. Brooke
Rossi, an obstetrician and gynecologist at University Hospitals
McDonald's Women's Hospital in Cleveland, said while rare, having twins
from different fathers can occur naturally.
The phenomenon can
occur when a woman produces two eggs during her fertility cycle instead
of one, and they can become fertilized and implant within a few days of
the same cycle.
"The sperm live in the genital
tract for two days," Rossi said. "It’s possible a woman can have sex
with a man on a Tuesday and have sex with a different man on Wednesday,
and it is possible for [her] to get pregnant," with twins.
The
rare phenomenon is called heteropaternal superfecundation in medical
literature. An estimated one in 13,000 paternity cases involves twins
with different fathers, according to a 1997 medical journal cited in the
court ruling.
Rossi said because fertilization
would happen so close together, the fetuses would be the same
gestational age and would be expected to be born without any related
health complications.
In the New Jersey case,
according to the court documents, the mother of the twins said in court
she had sex with two different men around the time she conceived.
However, she gave just one name in her petition for child support.
While
it's been a known phenomenon since the 1970s, according to court
documents, there have been just two other reported legal cases of twins
with different fathers in the U.S.
