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Someone Else’s Twin
The True Story of Babies Switched at Birth by Dr. Nancy L. Segal Prometheus Books
Kasia and Edyta are mirror images of each other. Yet for the first 17 years of their lives, they were complete strangers.
One afternoon in Warsaw, Poland, friends of Kasia were surprised to see their friend at a club in army boots and a black leather jacket, which was not her style, though she later denied being there. Then, in 2000, a mutual friend gave Kasia a phone number of a “double” of her.
The two women agreed to see each other, though they were doubtful it was anything more than coincidence. Kasia already had a fraternal twin, Nina. And Edyta thought the mutual friend was overstating how much they looked alike.
But when they met, the similarities were too striking to be discounted. They had the same moles on their hands, had the same clubfoot defect as children, loved to paint, wore similar outfits and even enjoyed the same unusual pork roast dish with prunes.
The similarities weren’t just physical. While Nina was an introvert who enjoyed playing with dolls, Edyta was much more like Kasia, an outgoing girl with a zest for skiing and sailing.
Over time, Kasia and Edyta discovered that they were separated through a mistake at their local hospital. All three girls had been treated for lung infections two weeks after they were born. Somehow, their ID bracelets had been lost in the shuffle and Edyta went home with non-biological parents, while Kasia and Nina were incorrectly paired as fraternal twins.
An estimated 20,000 accidental baby switches occur in the United States every year, though most are likely corrected before the infants go home with the wrong parents. It’s every mother’s worst nightmare. Dozens of books and movies are devoted to this phenomenon and endless “Days of Our Lives” episodes have used it as a plot device.
Still, the actual, documented cases of twins switched at birth worldwide is much lower: seven.
Dr. Nancy L. Segal examines what researchers have learned from these tragic instances about the nature of siblings in her new book, “Someone Else’s Twin.”
How similar twins really are, and how much biology versus parenting has to do with it, is more relevant than ever. Twinning in the US has increased — mostly due to the increased use of assisted reproductive techniques — from one in 60 births in 1980 to one in 30 in 2008.
Fraternal twins occur more often in older, taller and heavier women, because they are more likely to release levels of follicle-stimulating hormones that are correlated with twinning. Identical twins occur when a single fertilized egg is split; fraternal twins are born when the mother simultaneously releases two eggs that are fertilized by two different sperm.
Fraternal twins are as related as full siblings (sharing 50% of their genetics). Identical twins, meanwhile, have 100% of the same genetics, give or take “errors in cell division, mutation copy number variation” and so forth, but still are as “close as possible to natural human clones,” Segal writes.
Segal has a personal connection to twin studies (this is her third book on the subject) because she is a fraternal twin. She became attracted to raised-apart twin studies years ago and has been fascinated by them ever since.
What the studies have found is that genetic influence on general intelligence ranges from 50% to 70% and slightly less on personality and interests, she says.
However, identical twins raised together will have similar IQs about 86% of the time, while those raised apart only show slightly less equivalence at about 73%.
Overall, she said that twins raised alike are not considerably more similar in IQ range than those raised apart. She also says that “twins treated alike are not more behaviorally alike than twins treated differently.”
“It’s just that they share more genes in common,” Segal told The Post. “What we find consistently is that genetics places a much more pervasive role than previously thought.”
Genetics doesn’t always, however, determine a mother’s love. Take two Swiss twins born in 1941, who were separated at birth just after they were born. One twin, Philippe, and a boy from another mother, Paul, were sent off with a French woman while the other twin, Ernestli, went with his non-biological mother, a German woman.
The French woman, Madeleine Joye, took an instant preference to Paul, the non-biological boy, writing a book about her experience called “He Was Not My Son.”
“There was Paul, the beautiful comforting Paul, with his round cheeks, his plump body and happy air . . . The other was Philippe, the gray, bony unfortunate one.”
All three children ended up in the same school. Everyone noticed the similarity, and Philippe and Ernestli even had the same dental abnormality that was only common in about .4% of the European population. The families agreed to a skin graft (DNA testing was not available at the time). The graft between Philippe and Ernestli (the real twins) healed; while the one between Paul and Philippe died. The sons were switched back at 7 years old.
Philippe and Ernestli, who changed his name to Charles, adjusted to their new circumstances as real twins: Philippe became an architect and Charles worked as a shopping mall designer. They remained extremely close until Charles’ death in 2008.
But Paul, Joye’s favorite, was never accepted by his biological mother and spent his adolescence in boarding schools and foster homes. He became a postal worker and passed away at 47 years old from cancer.
Segal believes that these parents did not properly handle the situation (though she does point out that there was no precedent for them to follow, nor is there one now).
“I believe Paul and Ernestli should have remained with the families who raised them. The parent-child bond is very strong by age 7, so visitation and/or joint custody would have been emotionally easier and more realistic choice for everyone.”
Still, even when the mistake is caught early, the results can be as damaging. In Puerto Rico in 1985, one set of fraternal twins, Samantha and Jennifer, and another set of identical ones, Tairí Mari and Mari Tairí, were switched at birth because both of the last names were Hernandez.
Though the babies were returned to their rightful parents by the age of 2, one set of parents split up and the mother lived the rest of her life suffering from depression and anxiety. Sadly, Mari passed away when she was 9 years old from a brain hemorrhage. In fact, most of the parents that Segal interviewed about switched twins had never spoken before because the experience was too brutal.
Though Segal does not believe in that supernatural twin relationship (she says that none of the separated-at-birth twins ever suspected as much), she does speak about the special bond that twins do share once they meet.
Canadian separated twins George Holmes and Brent Tremblay met each other when they were 20 years old at Ottawa’s Carleton University — and were close friends for several months before suspecting that they might be related.
“The twin bond evolves from close companionship and similarity. Married people have a kind of connection, but when people match on so many behavioral characteristics, there is a real, important connection there,” Segal said.
Most of the time twin reunions happen because of chance encounters. One afternoon in Spain’s Canary Islands, Begoña walked into a mall to exchange a T-shirt. The shopkeeper acted strangely, saying hi and acting hurt when Begoña, who had never met her before, didn’t say hello.
When she returned a few days later to exchange the shirt, the same clerk was there. Now she said something absolutely bizarre. Begoña looked exactly like a woman named Delia, “as alike as two drops of water.”
The two women agreed to meet. They pushed their food away on a plate the same way, pursed their lips over their teeth when anxious and had the same unusual gait.
New Jersey twins Mark Newman and Jerry Levy, who were adopted by separate families, both independently became volunteer firefighters living 60 miles apart. When Jerry attended a firefighter convention in Wildwood, a friend decided to set up a surprise meeting.
When the two finally met, the 6-foot-4 brothers stood face-to-face and removed their hats.
“What’s my bald head doing on his shoulders?” Mark joked. They became close friends for a period of time — but eventually lost touch when one brother moved to Arizona and married.
All seven of these cases involve at least one set of identical twins. But Segal believes there are many more cases out there involving fraternal twins, where chance encounters would be not as common or meaningful.
“I do feel there are many more cases out there. Some aren’t reported, and some cases we will never know,” she said.
Segal hopes that hospitals across the world will implement better security and identification measures. One such easy way is to fingerprint a child right after birth and then before leaving the hospital.
“It’s a quick and easy solution,” she said.
Without these measures, the ramifications of these discoveries can be devastating. Though the Polish twins, Kasia and Edyta, became close, the non-biological sister, Nina, did not fare as well. She severed ties with her biological and non-biological family, prompting her surrogate father to wish that the reunion never happened.
“I’d have preferred to continue living as we did before, without knowing,” the father of the twins said. “If only the mistake had been discovered when they were little.”