A woman pregnant with a rare form of conjoined twins spoke yesterday of her desire to see them born.
Lisa Chamberlain (25) had a scan last week which showed her embryo had two heads and one body – making them dicephalus twins.
Ms Chamberlain, a Catholic, said doctors advised her to have an abortion but this was ruled out after discussing the matter with her husband.
Ms Chamberlain, from Ports-mouth, told the Sunnewspaper: "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 hospital in Portsmouth last Wednesday with back pain.
She had become pregnant on December 18th.
On receiving the scan results, doctors and nurses “kept asking each other if they were babies who were close together – or ‘something else’,” said Ms Chamberlain.
“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 added that she and her husband had spent more than seven years trying to have children and “might not get another go”.
The couple hope the babies will follow the example of US conjoined twins Abigail and Brittany Hensel. They were born in March 1990 with shared organs below the navel and are still alive.
But conjoined twins expert Prof Lewis Spitz told the Sunthat Ms Chamberlain's embryo should be terminated.
They would have a greater risk of infection, he said, and have two heads controlling one side of the body’s nervous impulses.
The last conjoined twins born in the UK died within a few weeks of each other late last year following surgery to separate them. – (PA)