The Globe Gives Us Deja Vu

Dear Globe,

Hello there, friends. Boston Daily here. We were a little confused when we picked up our copy of the paper today. On the front page, you have an article titled “Massachusetts, land of twins.”

We hadn’t had our coffee yet, so you’ll have to forgive us for thinking we’d picked up a copy of this month’s issue of Boston magazine and were reading Julie Suratt’s story titled “Double Trouble.”

You start out pretty staid and dull.

In a collision of science and demographics, Massachusetts has emerged as the nation’s most prolific producer of twins, triplets, and other multiple births.

The combination of an unusually large number of pregnancies in older women, who are more likely to have multiples, and a heavy reliance on readily available infertility treatments, which also increase the odds, has propelled Massachusetts to the top[.]

Boy. That’s got to be pretty stressful for the parents who go from no children to two or more at once.

“Those of us who have one child at a time find it challenging,” [director of Brigham and Women’s Center for Reproductive Medicine Mark Hornstein] said. “If you multiply that by two or three, I think you can imagine the stresses.”

Readers of your article can only imagine the stresses, since you quote only one mother of twins. In her piece, Suratt talks about the positives and negatives of being a mother of twins while addressing the strain all these multiple births put on the healthcare and education systems.

“I went from being someone who was up by 5 a.m., who had run assorted errands by 9 a.m., to someone who could not get out of bed,” says a Framingham mom of the birth of her twins at 31 weeks. One baby was ready to come home three weeks before the other, but refused to sleep at night longer than an hour at a time. “I was so exhausted that I didn’t have the energy to pack up baby number one and make the 40-minute trip to the hospital to visit baby number two. It got to the point that the hospital social worker suggested that I consider putting baby number two up for adoption because she thought I was not interested in him.”

We admit we’ve got a bias, but we liked this story better when Julie wrote it.

Smooches,
Boston Daily

Photo by Carol Kaplan