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| Ultrasound Scan Twin Pregnancy |
FATHER K (KARL): We had a nightmare one. The scanner looked at the screen and confidently announced that the foetus had a cyst on it, estimated at 18 centimetres. So we had a fantastic weekend worrying ourselves about that. Then we went back and found that she had misread something and it was 1.8 centimetres, and that actually it had since disappeared - it was a piece of fluff on the screen or something. So we were well chuffed about that. We'd spent the whole weekend thinking about surgical interventions. A weekend in hell.
The medical profession, for all their good intentions, may not be much help. The more they try to reassure you, the more terrified you will become. First-time parents who have fallen into scanning hell truly know the meaning of the word fear. And yet the probabilities involved are usually tiny. 1 in 200 - how much is that? Nothing. Even 1 in 3 means it's less likely to happen than not. But in scanning hell, a tiny chance of something happening always seems to be magnified into a raging certainty. The truth is that most pregnancies are uneventful and completely successful.
Even if the probabilities begin to grow, chances are you will have a beautiful and healthy little baby (or at least, as beautiful as your genes will allow it to be). Take, as an example, Down's syndrome. The probabilities rise with the age of the mother, from 1 in 2,000 for a 20-year-old mother to a terrifying 1 in 12 for a 49-year-old.
But how many 49-year-olds are having babies? Very few. It's at the very edge of the fertility graph, and yet eleven out of twelve babies conceived by a 49-year-old woman won't have Down's syndrome. I think those are pretty good odds. With screening now almost universal, abnormalities have become rarer than you might think, only around five in every 10,000 births these days are Down's babies. The spina bifida rate is even lower.
Far more likely than an abnormality are twins. These will definitely show up on the first scan. Instead of one beating heart, two. Instead of two waggly legs, four. Instead of one willy, one. So it's a boy and a girl then. About 15 births in every 1,000 are multiple births, and the rate is rising - in 1975 it was about 10 in 1,000. Partly this is because of IVF treatments, which commonly plant three little embryos in the womb - and sometimes all three develop.
A third of all multiple births are triplets or above, although quirts and sextuplets are much rarer than they used to be - the fertility treatments that produced them regularly in the 1960s and 1970s are out of fashion now. Twins mean twice the expense, appalling parental exhaustion and, almost certainly, no more children, because if it has happened once, it may happen again. Watch the face of the man who has just been told by the ultrasound operator that it's twins. The flash of delight across his face registers the huge pride he feels in his own exceptional potency. After 0.0014 of a second this is replaced by gloom and terror, which may mark him permanently. It's not great for the mother, either. Giving birth to the little loves is bad enough. Then there's the breastfeeding, which is apparently like something out of Dante's Inferno. To find out more, you can check out Ultrasound Scan Twin Pregnancy.