UK hospital separates Siamese twins, one dead

NOV 7: After at least 20 hours of surgery that began on Monday morning and ran until dawn on Tuesday, the hospital said one three-month-ol...

NOV 7: After at least 20 hours of surgery that began on Monday morning and ran until dawn on Tuesday, the hospital said one three-month-old twin had survived.

"Jodie is currently in a critical but stable condition. Unfortunately, despite all the efforts of the medical team, Mary sadly died,” said a spokeswoman for St. Mary’s hospital in Manchester, northern England. “As with all major surgery, the first few days following an operation are the most critical and our thoughts remain with Jodie and her parents,” she added.

The girls’ fate has been closely watched as surgeons, lawyers and churchmen argue over the best route for the girls, both of whom were expected to die absent the operation.

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The parents, who came to Britain seeking medical help from their home in Malta, had opposed the surgery on religious grounds but lost out to medics in a protracted legal fight.

The girls, known as Jodie and Mary to protect their true identity, were born on August 8, joined at the abdomen and with a fused spine. They shared one heart and one pair of lungs.

The hospital gave no precise details on Jodie’s condition but the surgery had run several hours longer than expected. Nor did they say at what point Mary, the weaker twin, had died.

Doctors said before the operation that Mary depended entirely on Jodie for her blood and would suck the life out of her stronger sister unless they were parted.

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Thus the 20-strong operating team had set out expressly to save Jodie by ending Mary’s life: a stance fiercely opposed by Catholic groups and anti-abortion campaigners.

The girls’ parents, devout Roman Catholics, had also said that God, not doctors, should decide their daughters’ fate.

But doctors argued that both twins would die without the surgery and British courts ruled that the operation should go ahead, despite the family’s deep-seated reticence.

Conjoined twins — the correct term for Siamese twins — occur once in every 50,000 to 100,000 births when a fertilized egg does not divide completely to form two separate babies.

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The family’s identity has been concealed due to intense publicity surrounding the case, but their life-and-death dilemma has raised fears that courts have set a dangerous new precedent in medical law.

"Are you entitled to kill one person to save another?” asked Dr Richard Nicholson, editor of the Bulletin of Medical Ethics

, ahead of the operation. “There is no clear ethical reason for saying that this is the right course of action.”

Nicholson said lawyers had ridden roughshod over the parents and that Jodie herself faced a dubious fate. “Her prospect of any high quality of life will be very small,” he said.