Multiple birth

Multiple birth is when one woman gives birth to more than one child at the same time. Depending on the number of children born, it can be called twins (two), triplets (three), quadruplets (four), and so on. There have been cases known in which a woman gave birth to eight children at once. These have a higher risk of dying.

The chance of multiple birth grows when artificial insemination is used. It is therefore used in China to outsmart the one-child policy.

Multiple Birth Media

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  Triplet brothers at graduation.

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  Fraternal twins at two weeks old. The technical term for "fraternal" is "dizygotic" (twins) or "polyzygotic" (triplets or higher order).

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  Fraternal twin sisters taking a nap. Nonidentical twins, the most common kind of multiple birth among humans, occur in about 1 out of every 80 pregnancies.

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  Identical triplets like these three sisters occur when a single fertilized egg splits in two and then one of the resulting two zygotes splits again.

• Monoamniotic triplets as seen on ultrasound

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  The Canadian Dionne sisters, seen in this 1947 photograph, were the first quintuplets known to survive infancy.

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  The Gosselin sextuplets with their parents and sisters, cover of KoreAm, May 2008

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  A woman bearing 9 or 11 children, Prodigiorum ac ostentorum chronicon, 1557, by Conrad Lycosthenes

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  Beatrix with her seven swan-children, from the Knight of the Swan romance (Talbot Shrewsbury Book)