There Really Are So Many More Twins Now

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From about 1915, when the statistical record begins, until 1980, about one in every 50 pregnancies resulted in twins, a rate of 2 percent. 

Then, the rate began to increase: by 1995, it was 2.5 percent. The rate surpassed 3 percent in 2001 and hit 3.3 percent in 2010. Now, twins are growing in one out of every 30 pregnant bellies. 

That’s a lot of “extra” twins above the 1980 baseline, but how many?

When the CDC calculated the number through 2009, they pegged it at 865,000. Now that several years more data is available, I recalculated the number. I took the number of twins that would have been born if the 1980 twin rate had held, and subtracted it from how many twins were actually born. 

The result: 1,009,337! That’s a million extra twins from 1981 through 2012, the most recent year for which data is available.

The blue portion of the columns indicate how many twin births would have occurred if the twin rate had stayed at the 1980 level. The red portion shows the number of twins born above the 1980 rate for each year (Computed from CDC data/Alexis Madrigal).

This article was originally published on www.theatlantic.com.  Read the complete article here.

 Image of twins via Shutterstock