A baby girl in Texas, United States was "born twice" after she was taken out of her mother's womb for a life-saving surgery.
The girl was extracted out of her mother, Margaret Hawkins Boemer's, womb for a 20-minutes surgery. When Boemer was 6-months pregnant, the doctor had discovered a tumour on the spine of the baby which would have been life threatening.
The girl, Lynlee Hope, had a mass on her spine known as a sacrococcygeal teratoma, which was diverting the flow of the blood from the foetus. The doctors said that the mass increased the risk of a fatal heart failure.
Boemer was initially carrying two babies but she lost one of them before her second trimester. She was also initially advised by the doctors to terminate her pregnancy after the tumour in the baby girl was found. However, Texas Children's Fetal Center suggested a risky surgery and she followed with it.
Reports state that unborn baby and the tumour on her spine were almost of the same size at the time of the operation. The surgeons had said that baby Lynlee has around a 50% chance of survival after the surgery. She weighed just 0.52 kg when she was taken out of her mother's womb.
"At 23 weeks, the tumour was shutting her heart down and causing her to go into cardiac failure, so it was a choice of allowing the tumour to take over her body or giving her a chance at life. It was an easy decision for us: We wanted to give her life," Boemer was quoted as saying by CNN.
The baby girl's heart stopped during the procedure, however, a heart specialist on the surgeons' team kept her alive while the tumour was extracted. After the removal of the tumour, she was placed back in her mother's womb and the uterus was sewed by the surgeons.
