Wilma: Koen’s biological father just looked at him from a distance. And though he was under no obligation to meet the son he never knew he had, when Koen was 18 months old, he did. The hospital located the man and confirmed he was Koen's biological father. The possibilities were staggering: Had the lab mixed someone else’s sperm with Wilma’s eggs? Had someone else’s egg been mixed with Willem’s sperm? Or had some other couples fertilized embyro been implanted in Wilma’s womb? Was he my child? Was he Willem’s child? Wasn’t he either one of ours? Wilma: We didn’t know either what was going on. Brussel: And when I started the subject she starts crying immediately, Wilma.Īfter half a year of worrying and wondering, the Stuarts where about to find out if their children, who’d been side by side since life began, were biologically related at all. I’m puzzling how that’s possible?’ Wilma: He asked us if it had occurred to us that they were so different in color. Brussel: I said, ‘I see two children and one is very white and one is very black. The Stuarts took both boys to a new pediatrician.ĭr. When the twins were six months old, Koen developed a bronchial infection. And she would say, “Where did you get such a brown baby? How’s that possible?” And we would say “I don’t know. ![]() Wilma: We were walking downtown, and there came a black woman looking in our baby carrier, looking at us. Whether white or black, people would speak up. People felt obliged to share their surprise. Wilma: They would say to me, ‘Are these your children?’ and I would say ‘Yes.’ ‘Is this a twin?’ ‘Yes, it’s a twin.’ ‘You must have gotten the scare of your life when he was born.’ And I would say ‘Why? He has two arms, two legs, he has a beautiful face.’ ![]() Pigment melanin, which determines skin color, may not fully develop until well after birth.īut what doctors in the Netherlands missed- strangers didn’t. But not a single doctor had ever raised a question, and in fact many doctors say that it is often impossible to identify the race of a newborn by skin tone. Wilma had long ago fallen hopelessly in love with her baby boys, and was haunted by the prospect that one of the boys might not be hers. Wilma: You don’t want to hear someone else say, “Well, we think that’s not your baby. With every possible explanation as to why was one of their babies was so dark, there remained the one nagging fear that no one wanted to say out loud. Wilma: I descend from French gypsies and he descends from Mongolian people so a little brown could be somewhere in the family. If not the jaundiced condition that so many babies are born with- what was it? So they would check that in his blood and the level would always be normal and they didn’t talk about it any more, so we didn’t either. Wilma: We would ask nurses, "How come that Koen’s so brown?" They would say that newborn babies have sometimes liver problems, and that they turn yellow. Wilma: At that time the difference was so big that I immediately said "He is brown, he’s very brown." I knew immediately that something went wrong.Īnd she started asking questions and looking for an explanation. ![]() It was three days before the Stuarts saw their new babies together. He went to an incubator on another floor of the hospital, while Koen was placed in a bassinet at his mother’s side. The second twin, Tuen, was born just three minutes later. Koen, short for Conrad, arrived at 2:55 a.m. On December 1, 1993, two boys were born by emergency caesarian section. ![]() Wilma settled in to enjoy her pregnancy, but the delivery was not as easy.
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