I'm currently pregnant with my third child, and admittedly the idea of twins terrifies me, despite the fact it would be cool to even out my kids with twin girls and be done with baby making, being that four is where we'd like to stop. When I heard a friend of mine was surprised by twins when she had an ultrasound at 20 weeks I was shocked. Most of what I had read suggested that twins were usually discovered early on with all our modern technological marvels. So, I started asking around…
How common is it to not know you're pregnant with twins?
Every webpage I read said this was "rare;" however, when I presented the question to my Facebook page for parents which boasted a mere 7,000 members at the time, six members said they were pregnant with twins and didn't find out until the second trimester, that makes seven counting my friend. As of 2009 the chance of twins was around 1 in 30 in the US, though a global rate couldn't be found. For rough estimates sake, let's do the math. You have a roughly 3.33% chance of twins overall. I asked 7,000' people, but according to page insights, only 1658 people saw the post. Assuming all of those people were females who have been pregnant-which is impossible to know and unlikely so these numbers are very rough and likely slightly skewed-about 55 of them would have been having twins. Seven of 55 is around 12.77%. Nearly 13% is not "rare," it's a fair chance you won't know.
How could you be pregnant with twins and not know?
In the majority of stories the women said that the heart beats of both babies were synced up, so that there was more than one baby wasn't discovered until they had an ultrasound around week 20 to determine sex. Many prenatal care providers will also do an ultrasound early on to confirm your due date, but in most cases these women didn't have one done. Two responders reported they did have early and multiple ultrasounds, but they were 2-dimensional Doppler scans. One mom only found out she was having twins thanks to appointment unavailability with her regular doctor who only had Doppler ultrasound. She wanted to know the sex of her baby right now, and bad enough that she made an appointment elsewhere receiving a 4D ultrasound as a result. It revealed twins.
It's easy with how advanced our medical equipment seems to assume the unknown is now known, but it is not that rare for technology to fail in this case. Many women are pregnant with twins and have no idea until much later into their pregnancies whether they had ultrasounds or not.
Were you pregnant with twins and didn't find out until late into your pregnancy? What's your story?
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