Multiple birth

Not to be confused with twins or triplets.

Multiple birth is when a singular woman gives birth to more than one child at once.

Depending on the number of children born, twins (two), triplets (three), quadruplets (four) are born. There have been women that have given birth to 4 or more children in one go before. In cases where woman gave birth to multiple children, there is a higher risk of mortality (death) for both the mother and baby and also a higher risk of birth defects.

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

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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)