@spotweldersfriend wrote:
Sounds very cubist to me
oooo you're going straight to hell for that one!
(and I'll be right behind you 
)
Parents fight to save unborn baby with two brains
10 Feb 2014
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 in Sydney's west, said they were shocked when a routine ultrasound revealed the twins they were expecting were in fact only one child, but with a very big difference.
Three-dimensional scans show the child has two legs, two arms and one body and all its vital organs, including a strong beating heart.
But above the neck, the child 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 โฆ I wasn't sure how to take in what he was explaining to me," Mr Howie told A Current Affair.
The rare duplication, known as craniofacial hyperhidrosis or diprosopus, is so rare that only 35 cases have ever been recorded.
Not one is alive today.
Ms Young, who suffers from rheumatoid arthritis, was 15 weeks and two days into her pregnancy when doctors broke the news and too far along to abort the child โ 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 there to be two children - the best chance of survival.
"It'd be the same as being a child with autism or down syndrome โฆ 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 โฆ it gives us a lot of support," Mr Howie said.
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 could prove 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.
She struggled to feed properly due to her condition and two months to the day she was born, she died.
"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."
Source: A Current Affair
