New and Noteworthy Twins

Twins are fascinating on so many levels. I enjoy media reports about twins because they go beyond human interest, revealing some fundamental features of human behavior and health. I have summarized a sampling of some of the articles and stories I have come across.

• Twin boys, Lenny and Moishe Spector, were born prematurely in Ukraine on February 25, following a surrogate pregnancy (Crane, 2022). This happened the day after Putin ordered Russian troops to invade that country.

The babies were transported from Kyiv to the Polish border by members of Project Dynamo in a mission named “Operation Gemini.” (Project Dynamo is a veteran and the civilian group that has been dedicated to evacuating Americans living in dangerous locations; see Project Dynamo.org.)

The twins entered Poland on March 7th, where their biological father was waiting for them. The twins’ mother planned to travel from Chicago to join her husband and twin infants in Poland before returning to the United States.

Surrogacy has flourished in Ukraine–women can earn 15,000 USD for carrying someone else’s child (Kramer & Varenikova, 2022). Childless couples from around the world have taken advantage of this service. A French couple donated embryos to a Ukrainian woman in her thirty-first week of a twin pregnancy as of March 12th. The prospective parents managed to travel to Ukraine and live with the surrogate and her family in Lviv. Biological parents must be present to obtain their children and confirm their citizenship. The nursery is now safe and well-stocked, but how long that can last is uncertain.

• It is unusual for twins to be born on different days, but opposite-sex twins, Aylin and Alfredo Trujillo, from California, arrived fifteen minutes apart and in different years–2021 and 2022 (Weber, 2022). Alfredo was delivered first at 11:45 p.m., and Aylin was delivered at approximately midnight. It is uncertain whether this difference will complicate their school entry or other life-history events.

A fraternal reared-apart twin who was part of the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart did not know that she and her twin sister had been born on different days and in different months. Therefore, finding her sister was delayed because she was looking for someone with the same date of birth.

• Identical twins Brittany and Cynthia Daniel co-starred in the 1994-1997 television series Sweet Valley High (Nolasco, 2022). In 2021, Brittany announced that she had given birth to her daughter Hope using her sister’s egg–a decision prompted by Brittany’s compromised health. The advantage of using an egg donated by Cynthia is that Brittany might have just as easily released it because they are genetically identical. Cynthia claims to feel like the baby’s aunt, but she is also her “genetic mother,” a term that describes some relationships in the entry that follows.

In 2007, I documented a related case in which an identical female twin delivered two children for her sister on two different occasions due to her sister’s health considerations (Segal, 2007). In that situation, the healthy twin was impregnated with her brother-in-law’s sperm, so the children were actually related to their biological parents.

• Briana and Brittany are identical twins married to identical twins Josh and Jeremy Salyers, respectively (Raiken, 2022). The four twins live in the same home. Both couples recently became boys' parents, Jett (Brittany and Josh) and Jax (Briana and Jeremy), who look remarkably alike. The physical resemblance of their children is not surprising, given that their parents are genetically interchangeable. It is also not surprising that each father regards his nephew as his own son—which he is in genetic terms. Moreover, in addition to being legal first cousins, the boys are genetically equivalent to full siblings. Families like this are categorized as “quarternary.’
• A Hungarian journalist contacted the International Society for Twin Studies regarding twin girls who may have been abducted from a maternity hospital and adopted outside the country. The twins would have been born in August 1996 to Deli Aranka. Aranka never believed that her twins had died, as she had been told by hospital staff. When she received official notice in 2014 stating that one of her twins had reached adulthood, she looked into the situation. She and many other parents belong to the Association for Missing Babies of Serbia. Anyone who has information should contact journalist Gréta Basity at bpgreti@gmail.com.
• It is unusual to find identical twins who differ in terms of having the COVID-19 vaccination, but Billy and Bobby Ford are such a pair (Reisman, 2021). The twins, originally from Williamsburg, Virginia, have been close brothers their entire lives. In 1993, Bobby opened Bobby’s Auto Service Center in Vero Beach, Florida, where Billy later joined him.

However, Bobby could not persuade his twin to become vaccinated because Billy believed in the conspiracy theories presented in the media. The twins also differed in diabetes that Billy developed later in life. Both twins were six feet three inches tall, but Billy started weight reduction medications when he reached 400 pounds, and Bobby (who was unaffected with diabetes) reduced his weight from 320 pounds to 240 pounds. Obesity is a risk factor for both diabetes and COVID-19 infection.

One of the twins’ coworkers contracted the virus, and then other employees became infected. Bobby showed minor symptoms, but Billy required hospitalization. Billy finally admitted that he wished he had been vaccinated–sadly, he passed away on August 14, 2021, at age fifty-nine. His twin brother Bobby said, “A twin is your best friend and your worst enemy. You have someone that looks just like you competing for the same friends, the same girls, the same everything.”

Understanding Twins Essential Reads

The Unique Development of Twin Language

How Parental Indifference Affects the Twin Bond

• The Guinness World Book recognized an identical twin pair, Umeno Sumiyama, and Koume Kodam, as the oldest twins on record (Mitchell, 2021). These identical twin sisters were born on November 3, 1913, and acquired their title when they turned 107 years and 330 days of age. The announcement took place on Japan’s national holiday, known as Respect for the Aged Day.
• Identical Puerto Rican twins Madeline and Margaret de Jeus were eliminated from the 1984 Olympic 4x400 relay (Time Magazine, 2021). That was because Madeline had taken her sister’s place after Margaret had been injured. Time did not indicate events leading to this discovery, but I found answers elsewhere (Tomizawa, 2017). Madeline had injured her hamstring in an earlier long jump competition and realized she could no longer compete.

Her identical twin sister was a spectator and a sprinter who did not qualify for the competition. No one knew of Madeline’s injury, so they arranged to have Margaret take her place. The deception was detected when a Puerto Rican journalist who had covered the sister’s athletic careers knew that only one twin had a beauty mark on her cheek and knew that the wrong twin was on the track.

This post was adapted from various contributions to the journal Twin Research and Human Genetics.