So I hear a very strange story on the radio. I can’t find any links about it, so it may all be a big fat lie, but I think it raises an interesting issue.
There is allegedly a boy, about seven years old, who has been weak and ill all of his life. He starts getting very sick suddenly and they determine he has a tumor. During the operation, they discover that it isn’t a tumor–it’s the boy’s twin who somehow developed somewhat (having hair and fingernails, etc.) while inside the boy.
Again, this is from the radio, so I may have the specifics wrong.
Let’s assume, for the moment, that my specifics are close enough. Suddenly we have a boy who is “pregnant.” We have a fetus who is draining the resources of the boy.
Is removing the fetus “abortion,” and would anti-abortion people be opposed to it?
That’s not pregnancy, really. It sounds to me like those cases of one egg or embryo or whatever kind of subsuming another long before birth. Apparently this time it didn’t go quite right.
If the fetus was dead before anything happened, as Julie says, then Blalron is right: removing it isn’t abortion and there’s nobody to blame or get mad at in an abortion-type debate. I’d imagine that even if this was discovered prior to the illness, you’d have to terminate the fetus because a boy isn’t at all equipped to carry it or give birth. But that’s just my guess and I don’t really know a lot of the background here.
I don’t know specifically what story you are referring to, but the general concept isn’t new, in fact it’s been used in numerous novels and movies.
These stories of 'swallowed twins" are old, and date from a time before tissue development and tumours were well understood. They have been variously believed to be twins that have been literally swallowed in utero, or absorbed by the growing embryo and so forth.
They are in fact a type of tumour known as a teratocarcinoma. Basically they are tumours originating in either the sperm/ova cell lines in the reproductive organs, or in germ cells. Since the cells the tumours derive form aren’t specialised they can behave as almost any type of cell as the tumour develops. In this case they appear to have become the hair and fingernail producing cells, which are essentially the same thing. In other cases teratocarcinomas have been removed that have developed into beating heart muscle, teeth, smooth muscle that contracts and squirms as it is probed and at the most extreme ends they develop functional striated muscle and nerve connections.
However these aren’t ‘ingested twins’, nor are they independently alive. They are simply tumours and no more individuals than are moles or warts. Yes they are parasitic, as are all tumours. However I don’t know of anyone who is ‘pro-life’ suggesting that tumours should be permitted free growth.
Do a Google search on teratocarcinoma/teratoma and I’m sure you’ll find all sorts of disgusting photos
…which sounds like something that couldn’t possibly survive on its own. A boy doesn’t have placenta or the rest of that important stuff. If this really was a fetus, how are the doctors suggesting it had survived for seven years? It couldn’t have been big enough to survive neglecting all the other things, I think, otherwise you’d imagine somebody would’ve noticed earlier.
Thanks for the info. I knew not to trust something on the radio!
If such a thing were possible, perhaps as a variant of conjoined twins, would anyone have ethical questions about what happens to the, um, “swallowed” twin?
Remind me never to have surgery in Khazakhstan if that’s the extent of the surgeons’ medical knowledge. With all the evidence pointing to a normal teratocarcinoma they declare it to be an ingested twin, a myth that was discredited at least 20 years ago.
I keep trying to find something about this vague memory of mine, but I can’t. Does anyone remember this besides me? About 20 years ago, 60 Minutes ran a story on a farmer in a remote area of China, who was somewhat shunned by his fellow villagers on account of his second head.
He was finally getting some modern medical attention. The…secondary head on his…other head was undeveloped, but had rudimentary eyes and a month that moved when he moved his own. Tests and scans revealed a small body underneath a hump on the farmer’s back, and that the smaller head has a separate brain showing some activity. This poor creature was way too developed to be a tumor, and the fact that most of it was within the farmer’s body…well. Would this count as an absorbed twin? The doctors were preparing to remove the… parasitic twin, although this wasn’t done at the time of the episode that I saw.
This freaked me out. Doubtless the poor guy would be better off without a second head, but the head showed brain activity. I felt that this was a sort of ethical dilemma on a par with separating newborn conjoined twins where it was clear that one would not survive the separation.
I remember that story from That’s Incredible, back when I was like 6 years old or something. Gonna do a search on it now, but from what I remember (and seeing, it gave me nightmares for a while) the Head was on the right side of the Farmers head, and he kept it covered up. Eventually the guy did have surgery to remove it, and I THINK they removed it alive.
There was a special on TLC a few months back about babies who survived against the odds- moms in comas, lightening-strikes, etc. One, a little boy, suffered from fetus in fetu. Unfortunately, by the time it was discovered and removed, it had caused gangrene in his bowel & intenstines (funny that a tiny little very dead fetus caused so much damage) and he nearly died before getting a transplant because he couldn’t eat and keep anything down. I didn’t even know that you could do transplants on the digestive system before then, but they did and now he’s ok, or was at the time of the special.
They did note during the special that the twin is always dead well before the survior is born, so it’s not realistic to think of it as an abortion when they operate to remove it.
Blech.