Rate of twins doubles in past 30 years
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By Maria Cendejas
As fertility treatment advances and more women have later-life childbirth in the United States, doubling the rate of twins in the past 30 years, according to AFP.
The National Center for Health Statistics' said that the number of twins in 2009 doubled, compared to 1980, rising from 68,339 to over 137,000 births in the United States.
The birth rate of twins grew 76% over the last 30 years, from 1.9 % of all births to 3.3%.
In 1980, 1 in every 53 US babies were twins and in comparison today the rate is 1 in every 30. In the last three decades, twin birth rates rose by nearly a 100% in every state among women of 35-39 and more than 200 percent among women aged 40 and over, the agency said.
Women in their 30s tend to have higher rates of "spontaneous twinning," or becoming pregnant with twins without the use of fertility therapy, than younger women.
The increase is likely due to the use of infertility treatments, such as in vitro fertilization and ovulation stimulation medications. It is more common in women over the age of 30.
Among white mothers, the rate of twin births doubled in the last 30 years, it rose about one-half among black mothers and by one-third among Hispanic mothers.
While twins may not be as novel as they once were, the United States might be a very different place without such advances against infertility, with 865,000 fewer twins born in the United States over three decades, the report said.
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