By Kaitlin Stanford for TheBump.com
Just a few weeks ago, writer Melanie Thernstrom shared the tale of her difficult (and unconventional) road to motherhood with The New York Times, in a personal essay that tugged at the heartstrings. There were countless rounds of failed IVF treatments, months spent researching adoption, and plenty of self-doubt and guilty feelings over the fact that her husband hadn't married someone younger -- someone "fertile." Now in her 40s, it seemed her hopes of having her own babies naturally -- and her dream of having twins -- were dashed. So Melanie and her husband, Michael, decided to do something others would later say was crazy: In an effort to have kids as "naturally" as possible and get twins out of the deal, they implanted two different fertilized eggs into two different surrogates at the same time -- thus creating "twiblings" born five days apart.
Ah, twiblings....Let the controversy begin!
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Blogs were immediately buzzing about the Thernstroms' story: Is it okay to go to such lengths to ensure you have twins? Were they playing with nature a little too much? One Today show blogger even openly declared how much the story weirded her "Irish-Catholic" self out -- and was promptly bashed by commenters. It seems most of us don't actually find the concept of twiblings so "wrong" after all. In a recent poll on TheBump.com, 35% of moms said it was no big deal, while 48% responded: "To each his own." (Just 17% said they thought it was a little odd.)
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The fact is, science is playing an increasingly larger role in helping us take charge of our own fate, and when it comes to conception, most of us are reaching a point where we can look beyond what we think is and isn't "normal." Case in point: Last month, the third baby of a set of triplets was born 11 years after her sisters, after a couple who had frozen fertilized embryos over a decade ago decided to go for baby number three by using a frozen embryo from the same treatment. Another couple waited 20 years in between implanting embryos from their same treatment, thereby creating a "twin" two decades after the first child was born.Where do you draw the line (if anywhere) when it comes to using modern science to manipulate fertility?
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