If you had been pregnant three times and gave birth to those children yet DNA testing showed you were not the biological mother, what would you do? This unfathomable predicament happened to a Washington state woman named Lydia Fairchild back in 2002 when she was pregnant with her third child.
Fairchild had recently separated from her husband, was out of work and struggling to make ends meet. She was compelled to apply for government assistance, but in order to qualify for the potential financial help Fairchild had to prove her children were in fact hers, via a DNA test. Fairchild assumed she would pass this step with flying colors, however, she received the news that neither of her children had any genetic link to her, i.e. she was not their biological mother.
Aside from the news that she might be charged with welfare fraud by Washington state prosecutors and lose custody of her children Fairchild was baffled by how a DNA test could say she was not the mother of her children when she had given birth to them. As Fairchild's third pregnancy came to term a judge ordered a witness to be present at the birth and blood samples be taken from the newborn. Not surprisingly, the results were the same, Fairchild was beside herself.
As luck would have it, a prosecutor assigned to her case came across an enlightening New England Journal of Medicine article. In it the authors talked about a phenomenon called "Chimerism," whereby a person begins life as a twin but somewhere in the early stages one of the twins absorbs, or somehow gobbles up the other twin and that absorbed twin settles into a certain location within the other twin's body. What!?!
After further testing, which included bringing Fairchild's mother into the fold, it was determined that her three children were in fact, her children. After a Pap smear the DNA was examined and lo and behold it matched her children. Fairchild's unknown but lost twin had been nestled inside of her ovaries as a collection of cells, and happened to be the biological mother of her three children, even though this twin was not really a human twin as we know it, with a human body.
Eventually Fairchild's case was dismissed and she didn't have to worry about losing her children to the state, but the discovery of a new family member would likely weigh heavy on her mind.
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