Fathers and Twins

In a dank, one-room Chicago tenement, agents of the board of health last fortnight discovered a pair of starving, premature twins, a boy and a girl who did not look alike. While hospital nurses washed and fed them, health officers last week tried to get their mother, a woman of 36, two years a widow, to clarify a complex situation. She had already had twelve children. Eight of those, ranging from 18 to two years of age, were living. She could not tell whether the father of her latest pair was one Luis Ersing, 24. or one Lanzarin Timoteo, 26, both jobless Spaniards. Luis' mother had been minding the babies after a fashion since they were born last month. And somebody had named them Jose de Jesus and Ana Maria.

Both Ersing and Timoteo claimed to be the twins' father; both wanted possession of them; both wanted to marry the widow; neither could legally do so, because both had wives, although neither knew where his wife was. At this stage of these unusual proceedings, the publicity-wise president of Chicago's board of health, Dr. Herman Niels Bundesen, father of six, came forward. He had samples of blood drawn from the men, mother and infants to make tests for paternity. A child inherits the characteristics of his parents' bloods in much the same manner as he inherits the shape and color of their eyes. Dr. Bundesen found that either Ersing or Timoteo could be the father of the twins.

"Or," added he startlingly, "of either one of the babies." Superfecundation is a physiological possibility. Ordinarily only one ovum is expelled from one or the other ovary during each monthly cycle. So, ordinarily only one ovum can be fertilized. Ovaries may or may not alternate in ovulation. Occasionally two ova are expelled at the same time or very close together and, if both are fertilized, twins result. According to this possibility, four years ago a South Dakotan claimed that he was father of only one of his wife's twins, and a judge agreed with him. Said Dr. Bundesen last week: "Since the twins are unlike and one is smaller than the other, there is a possibility that they may have two fathers. But the fathers won't listen to that. They don't even think much of the blood tests." As for the widow, whose name Dr. Bundesen kept private, 'I think she has a preference [between the men]. But she's leaving the decision to me." Meanwhile, Chicago, whose relief funds are exhausted, had on its hands the jobless men, the helpless twins, the widow and her eight other children.

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