A recent Times report revealed that a set of twins born in New Jersey apparently had different fathers, which was declared by a judge, after a court-ordered DNA test showed that the man identified in a paternity suit was the parent of only one of the girls.
Judge Sohail Mohammed acknowledged that the case would provoke “sheer disbelief”, but said the paternity test was accurate and that the conception of having twins fathered by two separate men was part of a rare but growing phenomenon termed “bi-paternal twins”.
The mother of the two years old twins told the board of social services in Passaic County, northern New Jersey, that a former lover was the real father of her twin girls. The board duly filed a child-support suit on her behalf last October, which referred to the mother only as TM and to their reputed father as AS.
A DNA test then revealed she was half correct: AS had fathered only one of the girls. Confronted with the finding, “the mother testified that within about a week, she had sexual intercourse with two men, AS and another man”, the judgment, filed this week, stated.
The other man in the picture is yet to be identified, and has not done a DNA test, the judge said. The New Jersey court had never seen anything like this, he added, although cases involving bi-paternal twins have been reported in New York and Colorado.
