WOMB TWIN INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE: 19th November 2011
A highly unusual international conference will be held in St Albans in Hertfordshire on Saturday November 19th 2011. This will be the fourth annual conference for Womb Twin, a voluntary organisation dedicated to helping womb twin survivors around the world. They started life in the womb as a twin but their twin died during the pregnancy or around birth. All their lives, they carry a sense of something missing, of having been a twin.
The conference will be organised as a "twin" conference, in two separate but adjoining rooms, with a variety of presentations and workshops running in parallel throughout the day. The founder of Womb Twin, Althea Hayton is anxious for people to know how common it is for a twin to be lost before birth, leaving a single baby. "1 person in 10 is a womb twin survivor, but very few people know anything about this" says Althea. "Womb twin survivors are of all ages - babies, children, teenagers, young people, parents and grandparents like me - but no one believes them when they say they have always known that they once had a twin. This is a vital piece of personal information and every womb twin survivor should know that this is what they are."
When a womb twin survivor comes for therapy, this important piece of personal information may never be discussed by either party, because no one realises the significance of it. If it is mentioned, ideas about having once being a twin may be misdiagnosed as some kind of “personality disorder,” when in fact this is a perfectly normal reaction to a rather unusual prenatal experience. As a result, womb twin survivors are at great risk of misdiagnosis, because of the current lack of good quality medical information about this topic.
An increasing number of medical conditions, including cerebral palsy, congenital disorders, premature birth and metabolic disorders in later life, are now being connected to conditions in the womb. The loss of a twin, particularly a monozygotic (identical) twin, is being implicated in many of these.
"This is a new and very important topic that should be more widely known" says Althea Hayton, founder and Chairman of Womb Twin. "A local GP told me that he made a presentation about this at a conference some years ago, only to be greeted with some scorn by many of his colleagues. It should be different today, for we know much more about life in the womb. We now know how common the "vanishing twin" pregnancies are, and that the sole survivor experiences a profound psychological effect."
"We will continue to hold a conference every year, with expert presenters from various countries of the world, until the world learns to listen to our story. This is a world-wide phenomenon, too prevalent and important to be ignored. "
Details and bookings here
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