Making Babies with Lunchtime Live
Sep 2, 2026 · 11 min · 7 segments
Every Wednesday afternoon, we’ll be talking Making Babies. Andrea will be joined by Professor Shane Higgins, Consultant Obstetrician and Gynaecologist, to cover every area of trying to have a baby…
Shane HigginsGuest
Andrea GilliganHost
And how common is it? Well, we had 114 multiple pregnancy births, and I use that term births, in 2025, which accounted for about 1.6% of all the births in the hospital.
We had seven sets of triplets and we had one set of quads in the course of 2025.
actually looking back at the five years data, it's up and down over those years.
Some years you'll have a slightly higher, some slightly lower, but it's in and around the 1.5%.
Is there any person in particular who has an increased chance of having a multiple pregnancy?
It used to be the case that patients who were undergoing IVF treatment were often at greater, not risk, but a greater likelihood to have a multiple pregnancy because On occasion, the provider, the healthcare provider would reinsert or would insert two or three embryos in the hope that one would take it off and they ended up with multiple pregnancies.
But you often hear people talk about, you know, oh, it's in the family, like she's pregnant with twins, it's her mother's mother.
No, there are different types of twins, but there's no kind of genetic predisposition to it.
And when we describe twins, when we're talking, if we were at an MDT and we were talking about twins, we'd refer to them in terms of their chorionicity.
So what we're talking about is, has the twins come from one egg that has split early? And you're going down the road of identical twins.
And how common is it? Well, we had 114 multiple pregnancy births, and I use that term births, in 2025, which accounted for about 1.6% of all the births in the hospital.
We had seven sets of triplets and we had one set of quads in the course of 2025.
actually looking back at the five years data, it's up and down over those years.
Some years you'll have a slightly higher, some slightly lower, but it's in and around the 1.5%.
Is there any person in particular who has an increased chance of having a multiple pregnancy?
It used to be the case that patients who were undergoing IVF treatment were often at greater, not risk, but a greater likelihood to have a multiple pregnancy because On occasion, the provider, the healthcare provider would reinsert or would insert two or three embryos in the hope that one would take it off and they ended up with multiple pregnancies.
But you often hear people talk about, you know, oh, it's in the family, like she's pregnant with twins, it's her mother's mother.
No, there are different types of twins, but there's no kind of genetic predisposition to it.
And when we describe twins, when we're talking, if we were at an MDT and we were talking about twins, we'd refer to them in terms of their chorionicity.
So what we're talking about is, has the twins come from one egg that has split early? And you're going down the road of identical twins.
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