A young woman was six months pregnant when an ultrasound showed her something she had never imagined finding: her baby had no legs and had a formation that looked like a small mermaid’s tail. The diagnosis was as strange as it was devastating: the baby had sirenomelia, an extremely rare congenital malformation known as “mermaid syndrome”.
The 23-year-old had been pregnant for half a year when doctors discovered that, in addition to the absence of legs, the fetus had no bladder and had an underdeveloped liver. The specialists explained that, if the baby were born, it would probably survive for only a few hours.
Faced with that diagnosis, she had to make one of the most difficult decisions of her life and end the pregnancy. Sirenomelia is an extraordinarily rare condition: it is estimated to occur in between one in every 60.000 and 100.000 births and, in many cases, is fatal during the first moments of life. 💔