• Question: how do u get triplets?

    Asked by littlellie to Clare, Mariana, Pedro, Robert, Susanne on 16 Nov 2012.
    • Photo: Susanne Muekusch

      Susanne Muekusch answered on 16 Nov 2012:

      hi littlellie,

      since this has been linked to the keyword “reproduction”, I now know what you mean. Sometimes I wonder whether it is me not understanding english well enough to understand the questions 🙂

      Ok, triplet birth. Triplets can occur when the mother by accident has three eggs ready for fertilisation instead of one. Semen contains so many million sperm cells, that all three can be fertilised and grow to be babies.

      Today, most triplets are a result not of a rare naturally occuring event, but of in vitro fertilisation. Using this technique several eggs are fertilised outside the woman’s body (i.e. in vitro) and reimplanted into her womb. Because not every fertilised egg will make it, they usually implant more than one. And it can happen, that all three make it- voila: Triplets!

    • Photo: Mariana Campos

      Mariana Campos answered on 16 Nov 2012:

      You can also get identical triplets: that happens if the fertilized egg splits in 3 embryos. That is very very rare: scientists are not very sure but some say that in each 1 million babies that are born you can have 1 set of triplets. But it happens. Imagine how difficult it would be to distinguish them!

    • Photo: Robert Insall

      Robert Insall answered on 16 Nov 2012:

      I have twins. They were made by in vitro fertilisation, as Susanne described. I sneaked a look at them with a microscope when they were embryos ;>
      When my twins were made they put in three fertilized eggs. If all had grown, I would have triplets. For my wife’s sake, I’m glad they didn’t. Twins is lovely though.

    • Photo: Clare Taylor

      Clare Taylor answered on 18 Nov 2012:

      Did you know that there have been cases were 8 babies were born from the same pregnancy and all survived? Imagine that, 8 babies all at once! Lucky that it is very rare!

      An interesting fact is that the more babies there are in the womb, the shorter the length of the pregnancy… For one baby, the average length is 38 weeks, but for twins 36 weeks, for triplets 32 weeks and for quadruplets 30 weeks. I guess the body can only support having all of those babies inside for a certain length of time and the shorter the time, the smaller the babies, so it really is amazing that the babies survive when there are as many as 8!

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