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| Jessica Allen with her family, Malachi is on the left side of screen. |
A California
woman got pregnant when she was already pregnant under a surrogacy contract
that resulted in ‘Twin Pregnancy’ with two different set of parents.
Jessica
Allen, 31- year old agreed to be a surrogate for a Chinese couple, through a surrogacy
agency in Southern California. Surrogacy
is legal in some states in US, including California, but it is illegal in China.
In April
2016, Jessica underwent a single embryo transfer with the Chinese couple’s
embryo after a successful IVF.
At six weeks
of pregnancy, she was told that she is carrying twins. She was a bit scared,
but the Chinese couple was thrilled. She and her partner thought that the
embryo must have split into two after implantation. Her $30,000 payment,
including expenses —was increased by $5,000 for the second child.
She denies
that throughout her prenatal period, none of the staff and physician at the
hospital told her that the babies were in separate sacs.
In December
2016, she gave births to both babies by C-section at a hospital in Riverside,
California. As per her legal contract with the surrogate agency, she was not allowed
to see the babies. She did briefly see a cell-phone picture and did notice that
they looked different.
On January 2017,
she received a message from the Chinese couple that the twins look different,
along with a picture.
“They are
not the same, right?” the message read, according to the New York Post. “Have
you thought about why they are different?”
A DNA test
soon followed and revealed that one of the twin was indeed Allen and Jasper’s
biological son. Despite using condoms, she has become pregnant with her own son,
after being already pregnant with the Chinese couple baby.
What
followed was a lengthy, expensive legal battle, but she finally won the case
and got her son back in February 2017. She and Jasper renamed their newest
family member Malachi, and he is now 10 months old.
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| Courtesy: Victoria Roberts |
Superfetation
is common among mammals, but in order for superfetation to occur in humans, three
seemingly impossible things need to happen at the same time: ovulation must
take place during an ongoing pregnancy, sperms must somehow penetrate the blocked
cervical canal with thick mucus plug and travel all the way into the fallopian
tube and finally, the embryo should successfully
implant itself in an already-occupied uterus. The odds of all three of them
happening together are very rare, making it an extremely rare occurrence.
A 2008 paper
in the European Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, mention that this phenomenon is so rare that
only 10 documented cases are mentioned in literature so far.
A review of
literature showed that superfetation is mentioned in some case of ARTs.
In the
meantime, this case should be a "reason for pause and thoughtfulness"
among physicians and surrogacy organization to check for superfetation in
unexpected twins in a surrogate mother said Dr. Saima Aftab, medical director
of the Fetal Care Center at Nicklaus Children's Hospital, who was not involved
in Allen's case.
