A baby boy has two other fetuses in his heart in a very rare situation.
Last month, a 32-year-old woman in India visited her local hospital for a routine scan during her 35-week pregnancy.
Although her previous scan was normal, doctors found “extra bone structure” in the abdomen of the unborn baby boy.
Further tests showed that there were two other malformed fetuses in the fetus abdomen.
In medical literature, this phenomenon known as the “fetal” is called the “fetal”. It is not clear how many of these involve multiple fetuses.
The woman gave birth to her son about 35 weeks of pregnancy on February 1, 2025, and the doctor deleted two fetuses that stopped growing from the baby’s stomach during pregnancy.
According to local reports, mothers and baby boys are healthy.
However, it is believed that the other two fetuses are too developed to survive.
Dr. Prasad Agarwal, who had the scan, told local media: “I was lucky and wary to notice something very unusual about this baby, with several bones in the abdomen and fetal-like structures, which were very normal to grow the fetus.
“This immediately felt abnormal. This is the fetus in fetu,’ is one of the rarest cases in the world.”
The new case is one of the eight-in-one cases where the absorbed fetal tissue is placed in the abdomen and doctors are likely to delete it without harming the mother or baby.
Other times, it is found in the baby’s mouth, scrotum, tailbone, or brain.
For example, in 2015, Chinese doctors successfully deleted the fetus found in a 20-day-old baby’s scrotum.
In a case reported last year, a one-year-old girl in China suffered a delay in development and was larger than average when the doctor found the fetus growing inside the skull.
The scan showed a five-inch mass on her skull, a little bigger than a baseball. The embedded mass is the long bones.
Although the doctor was able to remove the fetus, the girl suffered severe brain damage and died less than two weeks later.
