Woman Gives Birth To Baby With 3 Heads, 'Not Fully Developed' Body

In a rare case, a woman delivered a baby girl with three heads in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh on Friday, leaving doctors baffled.

The unidentified woman was rushed to a local hospital in the Etah district of Uttar Pradesh after she experienced extreme pain. However, the woman's family members were left stunned when she gave birth to a baby girl with three heads. Doctors at the local hospital asked the woman to get admitted to a better health care center in the state as it lacked advanced medical facilities.

Doctors said the baby was suffering from a rare birth defect called encephaloceles, a defect where part of the skull has not formed properly, due to which she had two large protrusions formed from the back of her skull. The mother, however, had not faced any complication during her pregnancy. Doctors were planning to conduct tests to find out what exactly caused the condition.

Rajesh Thakur, chief medical superintendent of the Etah district hospital, said, "This is a very rare medical condition. The child’s body has not fully developed. We will perform an MRI scan and then perform surgery to separate the ‘heads.'"

Babies diagnosed with the defect have a 55 percent survival rate and 75 percent of these babies, on an average, who manage to survive have varying degrees of mental deficit.

The incident comes a few months after neurosurgeons in India successfully operated on a baby with two heads at Sher-e-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences (SKIMS). The baby was admitted to the hospital in January and after weeks of preparing the baby physically to undergo the complex surgery, doctors separated “his large abnormal head from the normal head" in February. The baby was then discharged after he started to “suckle and cry like a normal baby."