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Bipaternal Twins: Vietnamese Twins Have One Mother But Two Fathers

By Anne Sewell
Published on: 22:00 PST, Mar 8, 2016

In what is an extremely rare phenomenon, a mother in Vietnam gave birth to twin babies from two different fathers. Reportedly the Vietnamese twins baffled their parents, as they looked so different, and DNA testing revealed they were bipaternal twins.

The phenomenon of the Vietnamese twins having two separate fathers was revealed by a DNA testing lab in Hanoi and announced on Tuesday this week.

While the names of the parents have not been released, the two-year-old twins reportedly looked so drastically different that eventually the father’s relatives urged him to take them for DNA testing.

According to a report in the Citizen, both twins are reportedly the same sex, but one child has thick, wavy hair, while the other has thin, straight hair, and their features vary. They were reportedly born on the same day, just a few hours apart.

Le Dinh Luong, president of the Genetic Association of Vietnam, told the media in that country that their center for genetic analysis and technology had tested the two children and found them to be a pair of bipaternal twins.

According to Le Dinh Luong, the results of the DNA tests showed the father in question was only the biological parent of one of the Vietnamese twins, while the mother was the biological parent of both children.

He said this is rare, not only in Vietnam but in the whole world, and then went on to explain why the two children could have two different fathers, but the same mother.

“This can happen if two eggs from the same mother are fertilized by sperm from two different men during separate acts of sexual intercourse within the same ovulation period.”

As reported by Channel News Asia, the time window within which eggs can be fertilized is reportedly small, with the father’s sperm cells capable of living inside a woman’s body for only four to five days. In the meanwhile, the lifespan of the woman’s egg is only a mere 12 to 48 hours.

The DNA tests run by the genetic center on the Vietnamese twins also ruled out any possible mix up with the babies at the hospital, due to the mother’s DNA being present in both twins.

Reportedly there was another rare case of bipaternal twins reported in the United States last year, where a court ruled that the husband was only required to pay child support for one child in a set of twin girls.

As reported by The Inquisitr, in that case the DNA test also showed the man was father to one of the twins, but that he wasn’t the father of the second bipaternal twin. The man will get to pay child support of $28 a week for the twin he actually fathered, but not for the other baby girl.

Reportedly that case was one of only three sets of bipaternal twins reported in the United States and was a one of a kind incident for New Jersey.

In that case, a Passaic County woman was seeking child support payments from the man she believed had fathered her two daughters, who were born in January 2013. The woman later admitted in court she had engaged in sexual relations with two different men within the same week.

Based on the testimony of the mother, along with what was revealed in the DNA tests, the judge ruled both twins had different fathers, and the man in question only had to support one of the pair.

[Photo via Flickr by Ale Art cropped and resized/CC BY-ND 2.0]

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