A baby born pregnant with twins? When I first saw this, I thought for sure that this must be one of those made-up tabloid stories. After reading it an looking further into the story, I found it to be quite true. The rare condition is called fetus-in-fetu, and fewer than 200 cases have been documented to date.
According to a report in the Hong Kong Medical Journal, when the little girl was born (at Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Hong Kong in 2010) doctors originally thought that she had two tumors in her abdomen. They were quite surprised to find that there were two fetuses instead. As a matter of fact, the fetuses were quite developed. They each had a spine, intestines, bones with bone marrow, “primitive” brain matter, an anus, a rib cage and an umbilical cord. How did the little girl get pregnant? “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,” Dr. Yu Kai-man told the South China Morning Post. At three weeks old, the baby underwent surgery to remove the twins. The twins, according to reports, had gestated up to 10 weeks.
