IN medieval Europe a woman would put on her husband’s clothes when labour started, hoping to transfer the birth pains to him.
The medieval belief that all fathers felt sympathetic pains when their children were born could get men in hot water. Villagers in the north of England would seek out the father of an illegitimate child simply by waiting for the mother to go into labour, and then scouring the village for any man lying ill in bed.
THERE is a strange myth that a premature baby of seven months has a better chance of survival than one of eight months. While it is now obvious that the longer the baby is in the uterus, the stronger it will be, this myth survives. It is believed that the idea originated with astrologers, to whom seven was a magic number.
Adoption
PERHAPS no other society honours friendship with the unselfishness of the Hawaiians. Those who are blessed with infants give them to those who are not, a practice known as hanai. Hanai takes place between close friends and family, the children know who their genetic parents are and see them regularly. The children are considered temporary gifts, not possessions.
THE first record of adoption by childless couples has been found in ancient Sumerian law codes dating from 1800 BC. The laws enabled childless couples to adopt a child so that their worldly possessions could be passed to an heir.
Be Fruitful and Multiply
THE world’s heaviest twins weighed in collectively at twenty-seven pounds and twelve ounces, and were born to Mrs J. P. Haskin of Fort Smith, Arizona, in 1924.
IN 1994, Cynthia Silveira gave birth to two healthy girls eight days apart, one from each of her two uteri. One in 50,000 women have two uteri, but the cases of pregnancy in both uteri in which the mother gave birth vaginally are astronomically rare.
MADISON Barbara, Jackson Frederick and Allison Rosemarie are a little different from most triplets. They were born to two women in different cities, and in different years.
When their parents, Linda and Marty Schaper, discovered it was unlikely they could have children of their own, Linda’s sister, Barb, suggested a plan. If they both had embryos implanted, it would increase the chances of Linda having children. Marty and Linda would be the biological parents, Linda would still have a chance of giving birth to her own child, but Barb, who already had a family, could be a surrogate mother. Both sisters underwent IVF – which was successful for both of them. Linda gave birth to her own twins in St Louis, on Christmas Day 1993, and Barb gave birth to the third triplet, Allison, in Columbia, Missouri on 25 January 1994.
ANOTHER unusual set of twins are Hanna and Eric Lynn, who were born ninety-four days apart. Pegge Lynn, who lives in Pennsylvania, gave birth first to Hanna, who was almost four months premature, on 10 November 1995. She weighed just twenty-three ounces. Doctors stitched Mrs Lynn’s cervix and gave her drugs to stop her labour progressing, and delay the delivery of the second twin as long as possible. They were incredibly successful – Eric was finally born on 2 February 1996, weighing a much healthier five pounds and seven ounces.
THIRTY-TWO-YEAR-OLD Czech Siamese twins Josepha and Rosa Blazek were admitted to hospital so that Rosa could give birth to her baby son. The father admitted paternity and was eager to marry Rosa, but he was told that if he did so, the Czech police would arrest him for bigamy as soon as the ceremony was over, so the son was registered as illegitimate.
TWO record-breakingly prolific women have each produced sixty-nine children. Mrs Fyodor Vassilet, a Russian, had sixty-nine babies in twenty-seven confinements – four sets of quadruplets, seven sets of triplets, and sixteen pairs of twins. She became extremely famous, and appeared at the court of Czar Alexander II. She died in 1872.
Her rival for the record, Mrs Bernard Schenberg of Austria, also had twenty-seven confinements, with four sets of quadruplets, seven sets of triplets, and sixteen pairs of twins. When she died in 1911, at the age of fifty-six, her husband Bernard remarried, and had a further eighteen children with his second wife.
THE most prolific mother living is Leontina Albina, born in 1925 in San Antonio, Chile, who gave birth to her fifty-fifth child in 1981. Amongst the births were five sets of triplets. Only forty children survived.
IN 1993, a woman who had been treated at one of the most prestigious fertility clinics in the Netherlands gave birth to twin sons – one black and one white. Both she and her partner, who had given his sperm for artificial insemination, are white. It seemed that a technician had reused a pipette that still contained some sperm from a previous insemination. DNA tests proved that the biological father of one of the twins is from the Caribbean island of Aruba.
GIOVANNI Aversa, an Italian living in Bristol, desperately wanted a son. After his wife Maria had given birth to two beautiful healthy daughters, they decided to try once more for a son. When Maria found she was expecting quadruplets, a delighted Giovanni was told that there was only a three million to one chance that his wife would have four daughters. At last, he was going to have his son to take to football matches. But, when Maria gave birth in March 1996 at the Southmead Hospital in Bristol, out came Giorgia, followed by Claudia, followed by Chiara, and finally Fabbrizia – four girls.
Unnatural Selection
FOR couples who are serious about sex selection, there are always the laboratory-based Sperm Olympics in Cleveland. Technicians put semen through various hurdles designed to separate the Y-bearing from X-bearing sperm. Laboratory methods take advantage of differences in weight, electrical charge and swimming speed to separate male from female sperm.
So far, they have apparently been correct fifty per cent of the time.
MORE than one in three couples who pay hundreds of pounds to chose the gender of their child at a controversial London fertility clinic end up with a baby of the opposite sex. The London Gender Clinic has estimated its success rates are more than fifty per cent but less than seventy per cent.
SUGAR and spice and all things nice, that’s what little girls are made of. Slugs and snails and puppy dogs’ tails, that’s what little boys are made of. Well, not quite, but according to a study originally done in France, and followed up in Canada and Belgium, an eighty per cent success rate has been notched up by parents eating certain foods in order to conceive the favoured sex. The menu suggested for conceiving boys is: bananas, cherries, grapes, oranges, peaches, melons, raspberries, sprouts, celery, tomatoes and sweet corn. For girls, parents should try tangerines, grapefruit, apples, pineapples, pears, cucumbers, radishes, lettuce, cabbages, carrots, turnips.
But, one word of caution – anyone suffering from kidney problems should avoid the calcium-rich girl diet, and people with high blood pressure should pass up the salt-rich boy diet.
Designer Labels
BUNNY Hart and Sharon Barnett have come up with a range of designer swimwear for babies, which includes the ‘Tarzan’ for boys, and for girls the one-shoulder ‘Jane’, the ‘Garbo’, the ‘Marilyn’ and the ‘Norma’. Their next collection will include tuxedo suits, and Lycra numbers which will be translucent except for appliqués of palm trees and flowers on strategic areas.
FOR