British Couple Pregnant With Conjoined Twins Refuses Doctors’ Abortion Advice
by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
January 12, 2009
London, England (LifeNews.com) — It seems to happen almost every day that physicians advise a pregnant couple to consider an abortion in a cases of a difficult pregnancy. That’s happened again with the parents of conjoined twins and the Catholic couple is drawing international headlines for refusing an abortion.
Lisa Chamberlain, 25, and her husband Mike are pregnant with rare dicephalous twins — meaning the bodies of the twins failed to develop properly leaving them with one torso and two heads.
Chamberlain, who lives in Portsmouth and is next yet one month pregnant, says doctors told her to have an abortion but she and her husband refused.
"To me, my twins are a gift from God and we’re determined to give them a chance of life," she said.
"Some might think my twins are strange, but to me they’re just special. Everything happens for a reason. Mike and I have spent over seven years trying to have children and we might not get another go," she added.
"Some people might look at me and say, ‘You’re going to give birth to a freak’ – but I don’t care because I feel blessed," Chamberlain told The Sun newspaper.
The twins were diagnosed after Lisa visited St Mary’s Hospital. She said that, after a scan, doctors and nurses "kept asking each other if they were babies who were close together – or ‘something else.’"
"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.
Chamberlain says she hopes to follow the example of American Siamese twins Abigail and Brittany Hensel who were born in March 1990 and are still alive despite having shared several major organs.
Michaela Aston, of the pro-life charity Life, tells the London Daily Mail that she supports their decision.
“This young mother knows it will be difficult but she is focusing on the fact that she is already the proud mother of these babies and accepts them however they are," she said.
“They may not be perfect in the eyes of the world but they are fully human and as such should have the same value and right to life as any other human beings," Aston added.
Lisa Chamberlain was told she may not be able to get pregnant because she had poly cystic ovaries.
Faith and Hope Williams, the last conjoined twins born in the UK, died late last year.
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