Parents of an unborn child with two faces and two brains are defying doctors’ advice to terminate the pregnancy.
Renee Young and Simon Howie, of Tregear NSW, were shocked when a routine ultrasound revealed that the baby they were expecting had two faces and two brains but had only one body.
Three-dimensional scans show the unborn baby has two legs, two arms and one body. All its vital organs, including a strong beating heart appeared to be normal.
However, attached to the torso above the neck, the baby has two faces on one skull, an exact duplication of eyes, nose and mouth, and two brains connected with one brain stem.
“Shocked, confused, a little bit of everything — I wasn’t sure how to take in what he was explaining to me,” Mr Howie told Channel 9’s A Current Affair.
The rare duplication is known as craniofacial hyperhidrosis or diprosopus. It is so rare that only 35 cases have ever been recorded. Not one is alive today.
The mother, who according to medical reports, suffers from rheumatoid arthritis, was 15 weeks and two days pregnant when doctors broke the news. It was too far along to abort the child — not that the couple considered it an option.
She must give birth to the child whether it is terminated or not and said she would rather give their daughter — or “daughters”, as they consider them to be two children — the best chance of survival.
“It’d be the same as being a child with autism or down syndrome … I don’t believe in terminating the baby if it’s healthy and growing fine, and everything is going to plan,” Mr Howie said. “Renee was the same.”
But Mr Howie said doctors disagreed, urging the parents of seven to terminate their unborn child “because it would be looked upon as a freak”.
“We’ve got a really big family, we don’t really involve ourselves in the community except for schools where the children are. We have a good family base … it gives us a lot of support,” Mr Howie was quoted to have stated.
Maternal foetal specialist Greg Kesby has seen several conjoined twins in his career but none quite like this.
“It’s probably the rarest of all the conjoined twins, you’d be thinking numbers of one in a million to one in two million for this kind of anomaly,” he said.
Dr Kesby said there was a good chance the couple’s child would not survive to a live birth but if she did, treatment may be costly.
But the soon-to-be family of 10, which lives in a four-bedroom social housing block and rely on a disability and carer’s pensions as income, said they would cross that bridge as it comes.
The last known case of diprosopus was the birth of baby girl Lali in 2008 in a remote Indian village.
The Indian baby struggled to feed properly because of her condition. She died two months later from the day she was born.
“If I only get two days with the baby, I only get two days with the baby. At least I have some time with it,” Ms Young, now 19 weeks pregnant, said.
“That’s just the time we actually get to spend with the baby and its brothers and sisters get to meet their little brother or sister.” (9 News)