Woman keeps rare conjoined twins
A woman pregnant with a rare form of conjoined twins plans to press ahead with the pregnancy.
Mother-to-be Lisa Chamberlain had a scan last week which showed her embryo had two heads and one body – making them dicephalus twins.
Leading experts said the twins’ chances of survival are exceedingly slim at best and advised termination.
But the 25-year-old from Portsmouth is reported to be a staunch Catholic who is opposed to abortion.
Ms Chamberlain decided against this after talking over the matter with partner Mike Pedace, 32.
Ms Chamberlain told the Sun: “To me, my twins are a gift from God and we’re determined to give them a chance of life.”
The twins were diagnosed after the former RSPCA worker was taken into the city’s St Mary’s Hospital on Wednesday with back pain. She had become pregnant in December.
The Sun reports that after the scan results appeared, Ms Chamberlain said doctors and nurses “kept asking each other if they were babies who were close together – or ’something else’.
“Then the emergency obstetrician was called and he took over. He said my babies only had one body and were joined very high up,” she told the paper.
She added: “Some might think my twins are strange, but to me they’re just special. Everything happens for a reason. Mike and I have spent over seven years trying to have children and we might not get another go.” CONJOINED TWINS
Conjoined twins are extremely rare, occurring in as few as one in every 200,000 births
They are created just a few days after they are conceived – most likely by the incomplete splitting of the fertilised egg
Most are stillborn, and a proportion of those who are born alive do not survive long afterwards