Just as it says, though I suppose the question could also be asked of triplets and up. Can one fetus in a multiple pregnany miscarry while other(s) survive?
Yes, it sometimes happens.
Similar, but not quite the same:
I’m not sure if it happens in people, but in horses and cattle that are gestating twins, one of the twins may die in utero and become “mummified” – there aren’t any bacteria in the uterus to make it start decomposing, so it just sits there (I think they may dry up some, but I’m not sure), and the other fetus’ placenta produces enough progesterone to tell the mother’s body to keep the pregnancy going. The mare/cow can end up delivering one live, healthy foal/calf and one mummified fetus that is frozen at whatever developmental stage at which it died.
It happens occasionally with stillbirths. Miscarriages, which are defined as involving the fetus being under twenty weeks, not so much.
Huh, that’s interesting. In some stories I’ve read one twin had died in utero and my impression was that it would start to decompose, releasing poisions into the mothers body, and therefore, the doctors either start normal birth with hormones or do a cesarean.
Don’t they also induce a birth/ do a c-section if it’s just one single baby that’s die in utero, again because of poision fear?
Yes happened to a girl I know. They were having twins, then it was just one. I thought it would be insensitive to inquire about the details though I understand there was no operation, the dead one was just left in there.
My sister-in-law’s first pregnancy familiarized me with the term Vanishing Twin Syndrome.
I was apparently The Twin That Didn’t Vanish. Early on during the pregnancy, my mother experienced heavy bleeding and thought she’d miscarried, but I popped out eventually. The topic came up when we were watching a British documentary which stated that up to 20% of all pregnancies start out as multiples but end up as singletons.
This isn’t quite the same, but twins can differ vastly in health. My great-grandmother bore twins. She’d had measles or scarlet fever during the pregnancy. One baby was said to be a fine looking boy, and the other was very small, red and wrinkled. The good looking baby died less than a day after birth, and the puny little baby, the one that needed to be kept warm by the stove, grew up to be my great-uncle George, who lived to be ninety.