Hello and welcome to the Woman's R podcast for Parents. Francesca Siegel is an award-winning

novelist and she's now a mother with a memoir of the unexpected things that happened when

she gave birth to twin daughters ten weeks before their due date. The girls were in intensive

care receiving the best possible medical support but it's the women she meets in the milking

shed where the women go to express breast milk for their babies who hold each other up.

The book is called Mother Ship and Francesca explained what was her initial reaction when she

discovered she was expecting twins. I was absolutely gobsmacked. I suppose everyone must say that

but I was particularly gobsmacked because my husband and I were slightly trepidaceous about

having children at all. We very much wanted them but we were just scared and slightly baby-ish

and our agreement between ourselves is we'll just have one. So then when I had this scan and

the stenographer said there's two and they're identical. I sort of I laughed really.

So how prepared were you for the fact that twins are often premature?

And awful lot of people tried to prepare me I think to be fair. I was immediately

you're under beautiful consultant care in the NHS when you have identical twins. It's a high-risk

pregnancy inherently and so I was told that they might come early and I went to a talk a tamber talk

about twins and parenting twins and I should have been more prepared than I was but I think I

just didn't take it in. It was frightening and I didn't listen. Now you did actually go into

labour at 29 weeks but they were actually delivered at 30 weeks. Now that is very significant why?

Why does that one number make such a difference? It's a taxonomic shift as much as anything else but

we move from one risk level to another really sort of under 30 weeks is extremely premature

and 30 weeks and above I think is very premature and the outcomes are considered to be quite

different in those two categories and so it was just a number but it was also something that I

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