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A few months ago my parents freaked me out by telling me there was a good chance I was one of twins, but that my sibling had died in the womb. I'm left handed, but there is no left-handedness in the family - apparently this can be an indicator of a missing twin. Not much evidence on its own, but my mum had a heavy bleed resulting in near miscarriage (and in fact nearly resulting in her own death) only a few weeks into the pregnancy. My parents think this adds up to the possibility that she actually DID have a misscarriage at that point - that my twin died.
I researched it on the internet, but stupidly added nothing to favourites and now can't find anything on it that includes the left-handed thing.
Has anyone else heard about this "Vanishing Twin" theory and the link to left handedness in the "survivor"? Is there any better evidence out there?
PS - I was born in early 1983 and my mum also claims that less frequent scanning in the early 80s could be the reason why the "other twin" was never spotted by medical staff.
Thanks for your help in advance!
No best answer has yet been selected by acw. Once a best answer has been selected, it will be shown here.
For more on marking an answer as the "Best Answer", please visit our FAQ.I read in a book about twins, that some quite large proportion of pregnancies begin as twins. I believe it was something like 20%. Most of these end up as singletons because one fetus miscarries very early on; so early in fact that often it is mistaken for a period.
I'm unsure about whether this is true for identical twins; surely sharing the same placenta would mean that if one miscarried they both would?
Finally: some identical twins do have the same handedness, and some twins are 'mirror' twins, it depends on their position in the womb. These twins will basically be mirror images of each other; usually with opposite handedness, maybe cowlicks or moles in the same place but on the other side of the body. Watching a program on discovery health the other day, they had a set of (adult) identical twin ladies, with rather bent noses, one bent left and one right!
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