A 20-year-old woman has given birth to female conjoined twins in India’s northern state of Uttar Pradesh.
The twins, born Wednesday night at Jai Devi Hospital in the city of Agra, are attached at the chests and share one liver but have separate hearts and lungs.
The baby girls and their mother, Mohini Singh, all were doing fine, doctors said.
"They have four hands, four legs, two heads,” Dr. Shashi Gupta said. She noted that “both are surviving on one liver."
Separating them would require an expensive operation possible only in a bigger hospital in New Delhi, Gupta added.
Singh and her husband, a laborer, reportedly are not sure they could afford the surgery.
Conjoined twins occur once every 200,000 live births and most do not survive, according to the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore. About 40 to 60 percent are stillborn and about 35 percent live only one day.
Mortality rates for twins who undergo separation vary, depending on their type of connection and the organs they share, the center said.
