Everything You Need to Know to Have a Healthy Twin Pregnancy
Two new books filled with advice and assistance to help pregnant moms of multiples deliver healthy twins were released a few years ago--an autobiographical look by actress Jane Seymour ('Two at a Time...') on her experiences of being pregnant with her now 7 1/2-year-old twin sons, and a step-by-step guide by a New York City-based OB-GYN ('Everything You Need to Know...') who also is a mom of twins. Seymour promoted the book with a national media tour with TV, radio and print interviews but 'Everything You Need to Know' was hardly noticed at all.
While both books offer solid strategies for helping moms make it through their pregnancies, for those parents looking for one overall reference to consult, we highly recommend picking up Dr. Leiter's handbook and ignoring Seymour's much more impractical look at mothering twins.
Want to sum up the two books in one quick comparison? Seymour's 'Two at a Time' tells you almost everything you may want to know about her pregnancy with twins, while Dr. Leiter's 'Everything You Need to Know' tells you almost everything you may want to learn about your own pregnancy with multiples.
Unfortunately, in a quiet marketplace filled with books and articles that sometimes present conflicting and even incorrect information to women who are pregnant with twins, these two library additions also include facts that don't match. Here's one passage from 'Two at a Time' in which Seymour relates how she deals with questions on whether her twins are identical or fraternal: "My boys have a strong family resemblance to each other, but they are fraternal. Still, people are forever asking me if they are identical. More to the point, they also ask me how I can be sure whether they're identical or fraternal. Usually, I simply smile and tell them to look a little more carefully at the boys, and they'll see the differences. With closer friends I tell them I know because all babies conceived with helps, as ours were, are fraternal."
Compare that with this passage in Dr. Leiter's book: Some 3.5 to 4 births in 1,000 are monozygotic (identical) twins, a rate that seems to be fairly constant throughout the world. However, for reasons that we don't fully understand, women who are having ART (Assisted Reproductive Technology), seem to conceive monozygotic twins at a rate two to three times higher than in unassisted pregnancies.
'Everything You Need to Know' does come close to its title and is laid out in chronologically-arranged chapters that take you through the twin pregnancy from before conception to comprehensive looks at each trimester to the actual labor and bringing your twins home. We found it to be filled with quality information without the scare factor that you sometimes see in other books about multiple pregnancies.
For those women pregnant with twins who don't have a body double, we suggest reading Dr. Leiter's book. If you want to gain additional perspective, particularly how it applies to a woman who had difficulties becoming pregant as well as some challenges during the pregnancy but then gave birth to a healthy set of twins, Seymour's book would be a good addition.
Buy Everything you Need to Know... at Amazon.Com, for just $12.76.
(please note we do not sell this book directly here at Twinstuff)
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