Frozen Assets: ‘Twin’ Sisters Born 18 Months Apart

To their doting father, they’re his long-awaited twins. To scientist Patrick Steptoe, they are a landmark in test-tube babies. Schoolteacher Mary Wright first gave birth to a test-tube daughter in London in October, 1985, then gave birth to her second on Wednesday. Both were from embryos that had been fertilized and frozen at the same time but thawed and implanted in Wright separately. The girls’ father, Philip Wright, said he considered 18-month-old Amy and day-old Elizabeth Mary fraternal twins. But Steptoe, hailing the birth as a “world first,” said they are technically not twins because they came from different pregnancies. “I’m still pinching myself,” Mary Wright said. Steptoe said that 50 babies have been born from frozen embryos, but that this was the first time two babies had been born from frozen embryos to the same woman.

--More on mothers in the news: Eight women have been selected as the outstanding moms of 1987 by the National Mother’s Day Committee. And the winners are: actresses Lynn Redgrave and Linda Lavin; Rosalyn Yalow, Nobel Prize winner for medicine in 1977; reporters Connie Collins of WNBC-TV in New York and Ann Compton of ABC News; Rep. Lindy Boggs (D-La.); businesswoman Evelyn Lauder, and Brigitte Gerney, the Manhattan woman who has undergone eight operations since her legs were crushed two years ago by a crane at a construction site. Lauder, corporate vice president of cosmetics manufacturer Estee Lauder, said that having both a family and career means compromise. “The first priority is to take on the responsibility of the family, sometimes at the expense of your careers,” she said.

--A stamp collector looking through a dumpster for specimens didn’t find anything that would interest a philatelist but he did find something that might send a few Rhode Island taxpayers through the roof--about a dozen checks that had been sent to the state to pay taxes, including one for $13,000. Apparently the checks had been accidentally dumped by the state tax office, which uses machines to open the mailed returns and empty them of their contents. Also retrieved from the trash was a complete tax return. State Tax Administrator Gary Clark reasoned that with 43,000 returns coming in, a few are bound to get lost in the shuffle. “It’s not that our system has broken down,” he said. “Technology is wonderful, but it doesn’t work 100% of the time.”