Birth of Siamese twins is very rare – one in 50,000 to 1 lakh child births.
A gutsy village woman saved two conjoined twin girls from being sacrificed at the altar of black magic. The babies were born on Monday to Shobha Pawar, 25, a resident of Olawa village in Panvel.
The babies are presently at Wadia hospital, Parel.
Shobha and her husband, Arun, 27 – an unlettered couple having a three-year-old daughter – were shocked to see the babies joined below the stomach. The babies were born at their rented village home.
As word spread about the curious case of the conjoined twins, Arun was about to hand them over to a practitioner of black magic who coaxed them to sacrifice the newborns. That’s when an alert neighbour, Reshma Khatri, 23, intervened.
“I fought with the father and threatened to call the police. But no villager came to help the babies,” said Khatri who called up child rights organisation, Pratham, to help take the babies to hospital.
On Monday, before deciding to kill the babies, the Pawars had taken them to the civic-run Sion hospital for consultation.
“When we asked the parents to get the babies admitted, the father absconded with the children,” said head of Sion hospital’s paediatric surgery, Paras Kothari.
The twins, symmetrically conjoined at 180 degrees, form hardly 6% of all conjoined varieties.
Medically called ischiopagus twins, primary reports indicate that the babies, weighing close to 5kilos, have a set of arms and legs, a vagina each and a common anus. Cases of such twin births are rare – one in 50,000 to 1lakh.
With help from social workers at Pratham, an ambulance transported the conjoined baby girls to Wadia hospital in Parel.
A senior doctor at Wadia hospital said that their stomachs and internal organs could be fused.
“One of the babies, who has difficulty in breathing, is critical. We might not be able to save both the girls. It’s a critical case and investigation reports will have to be studied before taking a call on surgery,” said the doctor.
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