Anybody who can get pregnant could have twins, but it is never likely for anyone, regardless of family history.

Overall odds of any twins, identical or fraternal, are about 1 in 80. It does not skip a generation, as some have suggested. That is an old wives tale. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t, and sometimes it skips several. You never know when twins will occur.

When fraternal twins run in families, it comes from the female line because it has to do with a woman releasing more than one egg in a cycle. It can pass from a mother to a daughter and so on, but it’s no guarantee of twins. Your father’s side has nothing to do with it. Fraternal twins can also happen randomly.

There is no evidence to support that identical twins run in families. It is too random. The stat is about 1 in 325 live births. Scientists have not been able to isolate the moment of the split of the egg, so it is unknown why it happens. They do sometimes run in individuals, meaning that a woman who has had twins is more likely to produce them again than if she had a singleton pregnancy. This is also true of fraternal twins.

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