Before I got pregnant with my twins all I really knew about multiples was that they could be identical or fraternal. Seriously, that was pretty much it. After I found out that there were actually two babies in me I read a lot about multiples. You see, twins don't run in my family and we didn't use any sort of fertility drugs or IVF. I never dreamed in a million years that I would have twins. I started reading to figure out how this was possible.
It turns out that multiples births are on the rise for several reasons. 1) Women are having children when they are older. The more advanced a woman is in age the more likely she is to release an unusual number of eggs each month. Instead of the normal one egg, you might release three or zero. 2) For some reason larger women are more likely to have multiples. 3) Being on the pill for a long time can screw with your reproductive system. Right when you stop taking the pill you may be super fertile. 4) More couples are using fertility drugs and having fertility treatments, this can often lead to multiples. 5) Advanced medical knowledge is allowing more people to carry twins or higher order multiples to term, or keep more premature babies alive.
National Geographic aired a special recently called In the Womb: Multiples that mentions that in the past 20 years the occurrence of multiple births has increased by 400 percent in the US alone! I haven't seen this show (yet, it is in my Netflix queue) but it also talks about vanishing twin syndrome and mirror twins. There are theories that left handed people are actually mirror twins where the right handed twin didn't make it.
I don't buy that, but then again, I know a lot of twins where one is right handed and one is left handed. My own twins are a great example of this. My boy is a lefty and my girl is a righty. Wait - I'm a lefty. I wonder if I was a twin.
