Egyptian doctors remove baby’s second head

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Ghosty:
The death of the fully formed child didn’t have to imminent for the surgery to be licit, only reasonably foreseen. The “parasite” twin would not have survived long, they almost never do, and the removal of the deformed twin after it is dead would put an undo risk of death on the fully formed child.
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Well, they survived 10 months so far. Suppose it was foreseen that the parasite would have caused death to the host when it hit puberty. Would it be ok to do the surgery now? Or must we wait a decade or so, until death is closer at hand. After all, the child/children may die of disease at age 8.
 
I saw nothing in the article about the surgery being *necessary *to save the fully formed twin’s life. If there was much risk, why would they put off the surgery for 10 months? I’m afraid it never even occured to anyone to think of the “parasite” as a human being. People too easily dehumanize anyone who looks ‘creepy’ , is dependant, or disabled. Consider how easy it is for many to discard the unborn and brain damaged people…
 
I saw nothing in the article about the surgery being *necessary *to save the fully formed twin’s life. If there was much risk, why would they put off the surgery for 10 months? I’m afraid it never even occured to anyone to think of the “parasite” as a human being. People too easily dehumanize anyone who looks ‘creepy’ , is dependant, or disabled. Consider how easy it is for many to discard the unborn and brain damaged people…
 
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sbcoral:
It presumably had a functioning brain, as the article says it was able to blink and smile.
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The article I read said the surgery moved the brain tissue all into the head that was left. Sounds as though it was a “shared” brain, so cutting off the spare head would be like removing a spare arm, but much more complicated.
 
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rwoehmke:
The article I read said the surgery moved the brain tissue all into the head that was left.
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Not sure what article you read, but the one linked at the top of this thread says
The 13-strong surgical team separated Manar’s brain from the conjoined organ in small stages on Saturday
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So it appears that Manar got her own brain, while the conjoined “parasitic” brain was apparently left in the dead body.
 
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BlindSheep:
… If there was much risk, why would they put off the surgery for 10 months? ,…
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They said they were planning the surgery for months. Each one of these cases is unique with different connections between the shared systems

You don’t undertake 12 hours of surgery without a plan

Obviously there was a trade off waiting for the baby to be large/healthy enough to survive the surgery and waiting too long so that the development of the child is impaired

I don’t suppose you can learn to walk with a head on top of yours

I only hope the parasitic twin was not self aware

Imagine the reaction of others to her/it
Which head would get the attention?

Did it only occasionally smile because it was merely a reflex?
Or was no one interacting with her?

like I said; fit is fortunate that I’m not the one who had to make that call…it seems very cut and dry from a medical point of view…but that picture was …disturbing …
 
As others have said, they’ve been planning this operation for months. First they had to wait for the child to be stable enough to have a chance to survive the surgery, then they had to map out all of the veins, nerves, and brain-tissue to ensure a safe procedure. Even with all of this in place it took 12 hours to seperate the two. If they had waited until the deformed child died, or even became sick, they never would have been able to perform the surgery in time to save one of the children.
 
Aside from whether it was right or wrong to seperate these babies, I find it very disturbing that the “parasitic twin” (I cringe writing that) was NEVER acknowledged in any of these articles as being a person, but only some kind of inconvenience to the healthy twin.

It’s this kind of selective thinking that led to the horrors of abortion. :mad:
 
Mason, if you had a head growing off of yours, how would you view it? Probably as a health hazard which is an inconvenience!
 
Lily -
How you veiw something and what it is can be two different things. Millions of children have been killed because they were viewed as “an inconvenience”!
I agree with Mason. It is disturbing that it was never even mentioned. * If *the twin was a real threat to her life, the surgery was justified as Ghosty said., but if not, I can’t agree that it was ethical. It is simply wrong to kill one person to improve another’s quality of life.
If I had twin sister who was a head growing on top of mine, I’d always have someone to talk to. I suppose she could respond by blinking morse code. I would hold books upside down for her to read. I’d have the doctors fix her up with prosthetic arms she could control with her tongue and she could use them to type on message boards.
 
According to the article it appears that there were two people. And the doctors decided to murder one of them.
 
the second head could not drink, eat, or breathe, how many normal babies are accidentally malnourished because of fast growth? Eventually this second person would die because it could not be fed or breathe.
Regardless its a hard decision. The parents could of let both children naturally live and die at a very young age. Or the can, as they chose to, save the life of one baby while the other, who could not support itself, died.
We look as outsiders. I am sure this was truly tramautic and heartbreaking for those involved but, it had to be done.
 
I would actually contend that the “parasitic head” wasn’t a second person at all but simply an abnormal development of the body of one person.

This particular case occurs when an embryo begins to split. Normally such a splitting results in the development of identical twins. However, in this case the process of separation was never completed. Thus:
  1. All biological parts are derived from a single embryo
  2. All biological parts would also have the same genetic composition.
  3. No part ever existed as a separate body for any period of time.
As common as it is to think of the head as the center of the person, there is no reason to suggest that an immaterial soul has physical dimensions and can be located in a particular part of the body.

Why would the presence of a second smiling, blinking head with a brain be any more of an indication of a second person than the presence of an extra finger?
 
According to the article it appears that there were two people. And the doctors decided to murder one of them.
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According to the principles of double effect, they did no such thing. They performed a life-saving procedure that was not intended to kill anyone or anything, but understood from the outset that death was the sure outcome for at least one of the children.

Incidently, this is the case with all open-heart surgeries and major brain surgeries as well. Death isn’t the sure outcome in most cases, but many times it has at least an equal likelyhood as survival. When the alternative is certain premature death, as it would be in the case of the twins, such surgeries are certainly permissible.
 
Prometheum, your argument applies equally well to conjoined twins. If such twins are separated, do you believe another soul is formed during the surgery?
 
Does anyone have a link of some sort that shows that the one child’s brain was not controlling the second head? It seems that the argument could be made that the second head was not a person when separated the “second head” would not have any other essential body part (heart, intestine, liver, brain(?), lungs, etc.) If the second head was completely dependant on the body of the first, it could be argued that the head is a parasite, but if the head did have a brain the argument gets more complicated.
 
I know for a fact in some cases one brain can cantrol two heads in Parisitic twins. This will be observed as the two heads making the same faces. Rather than controling two heads independently.
 
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