A middle school in Massachusetts recently held its eighth-grade “moving up” ceremony for its graduating pupils, which included an impressive 23 sets of twins.
Principal Tamantha Bibbo reported that Pollard Middle School in Needham, Massachusetts, has a sizable student body. However, the sheer quantity of twins in the eighth-grade class this year is “quite unusual,” according to her.
“We typically have anywhere from five to 10 sets at most,” Bibbo stated. “Given our numbers, we have approximately 450 to 500 children in each grade, so this was extraordinarily high.”
About 10% of the class, according to her, consists of the 23 sets of twins and an additional eighth-grader whose twin brother attends a separate middle school.
At their “moving up” event on Wednesday, June 12, Bibbo informed them that they were given special recognition.
In the eighth grade at Pollard Middle School, there are more than three times as many twins as one could reasonably expect, since twins account for only 3% of live births in the United States, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.
Pollard Middle School twins’ fraction of identical or fraternal twins was unclear.
How typical are twins?
As per the U.K.’s National Health Service website, around one-third of all twins are identical, indicating that they were a single zygote that divided in the womb.
As they were two distinct zygotes and not very similar to any other sibling, the other two-thirds of twins are fraternal.
In contrast to identical twins, which are equally likely to develop in every pregnancy, fraternal twins may be related to genetic variables.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website, the number of twin (and other multiple) births in the United States has been gradually declining since 2019 after rising significantly for three decades.
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Without a doubt, twins are the most typical multiple birth. The CDC reports that 114,483 twin births were registered in the United States in 2022.
The CDC reports that there were 2,774 sets of triplets born in the United States in that same year, along with an additional 121 “quadruplet and other higher order births.”
The CDC stated that there was uncertainty on the causes of the rise in multiple births and that they could be related to a variety of factors, such as mother age and the use of reproductive treatments.
