Women accidentally carrying a "twin's" child.
Lydia Fairchild’s paternity test was meant to
be straightforward, proving to the courts that
her two sons’ father was the person she said
he was. When the test came back, however,
Fairchild herself came up as a blank: there
was no trace of her DNA in her own children.
The courts threatened to convict her of illegal
surrogacy – they assumed it was a scam to
gain benefits. Luckily, at around the same
time, a scientific paper reported a similar
case in which a woman was apparently not
the biological mother of two of her three
children. The reason was that she was a
chimera: a case in which two twins had
merged into one body early in development.
Being the product of two different cell lines,
some of her eggs carried a genome that
was different from the rest of the body.
Needless to say, the discovery has caused
Fairchild to question her own identity. “Telling
my sons about this was the hardest part
because I felt that part of me hadn't passed
on to them,” she told the website Jezebel. “I
thought, ‘Oh, I wonder if they'll really feel that
I'm not quite their real mother somehow
because the genes that I should've given to
them, I didn't give to them.’”
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