Carissa Gill was 24 weeks pregnant when she went with her partner, Randy Good, for an ultrasound at Fetal Vision Imaging in Levittown, Pennsylvania. They expected to see their daughters, but ended up seeing an image neither of them expected: Isabella and Callie appeared face-to-face, with their faces so close together that it looked as though they were kissing.
The mother explained that her daughters normally did not appear so close together during the 2D ultrasounds she had at the doctor’s office. “Seeing them face-to-face was a huge shock”, she told ABC News. She also recounted that at first one of the babies seemed to kiss her sister’s cheek, and then they began moving closer until their mouths were touching.
The examination took place on April 4, 2017, and the image was shared that same day by Fetal Vision Imaging on Instagram. The photograph quickly began circulating on social media and in the news, where it was described as a “kiss” between the twins.
The moment also caught the attention of the technician who performed the ultrasound. John Hamburg said he had conducted around 15,000 examinations of this kind and had never seen two twins positioned face-to-face in a way that seemed to show a kiss.
For Carissa, the scene was even more special because two weeks earlier she had seen her daughters kicking each other during another ultrasound. This time, however, they seemed to be moving closer together. “It was so beautiful to see”, she later recalled.
Randy was also struck by the image. “Seeing that ultrasound like that was invaluable to me”, he said. The couple expected Isabella and Callie to be born in late July and decided to keep the photograph to show their daughters someday.
Beyond whether they were actually “kissing”—something the image allows viewers to interpret, but that cannot be established as a conscious action by the babies—that ultrasound captured an extraordinarily special moment: two sisters who had not yet been born, but who already shared the same small space and appeared, for a moment, face-to-face.