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"Are They Really Twins?"
Top 6 Questions You Will Be Asked and How to Handle Them
By Elizabeth Lyons
This is usually a harmless question, and while you will quickly become royally irritated by it, I find that most people who ask it are genuinely just trying to make polite conversation. They are not the same people who will ask what form of fertility drugs you took or in what fancy position you and your husband had to "do it" to conceive more than one baby at the same time.
When people ask about twins running on one side or the other of our family, I usually just comment that they run on neither side. Few people understand that twins can only "run" on the mother's side. Only the mother can pass the tendency to naturally release more than one egg to her daughter. Though I'm sure they would love to claim otherwise, a man's sperm simply is not strong or appealing enough to force a woman's ovary to release yet another egg. Of course, identical twins have nothing to do with genetics. An egg splitting is purely a random act.