14 DAY TRIAL // A new and rather shocking case report published in the Hong Kong Medical Journal towards the end of last week tells the tale of a baby girl who was born pregnant. When surgeons got around to operating on her, they removed a set of twins from her womb.
In their report, the specialists who handled this case explain that, although extremely rare, such peculiar births are not unheard of. On the contrary, it appears that around 200 cases of babies born pregnant have until now been documented on a global scale.
At first, doctors mistook the fetuses for tumors
It is understood that the baby girl from whose body surgeons removed the two fetuses was born at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in the city of Hong Kong in China back in 2010. Shortly after delivery, two odd formations were found hidden inside her abdomen.
At first, specialists assumed that what they were dealing with were tumors. However, when they had a closer look at the abnormal growths, they realized that they were the fetuses of a set of twin babies that the girl was carrying in her body.
Even weirder, it appears that the fetuses, estimated to have been in their 8th or maybe even 10th week of development when surgeons finally zoomed in on them, were connected to the baby girl's body via an umbilical cord that ended in a mass similar to a placenta.
The fetuses, weighing about 14.2 grams (0.5 ounces) and 9.3 grams (0.3 ounces), each had a spine, ribs, intestines and even limbs. Specialists say that, although they were developing inside the baby girl's body, the twins were really her siblings.
Thus, fetuses developed from eggs fertilized by the baby girl's parents. “Since it is impossible for the little girl to have conceived the pregnancy on her own, the fertilization of the twin fetuses, of course, belongs to her parents, which has gone to the wrong place,” says Dr. Yu Lai-man.
The girl had to undergo surgery to remove the twins
Opposing Views tells us that, when she was just 3 weeks old, the baby girl was operated on. During this intervention, doctors managed to remove not just the fetuses of the twins she was carrying in her body, but also the umbilical cord and the placenta-like mass that were supporting their development.
Not long after being operated on, the baby girl made a full recovery and was allowed to go home with her family. Despite this complicated surgical intervention that she was subjected to shortly after birth, the girl is expected to develop just like any other child does.