Status: Probably real
eKantipur.com (a Nepalese website) has reported the birth of a
severely deformed child to a woman in Dolakha. (Warning: the newspaper article contains a possibly disturbing image.) The poor child looks a bit like a mutant muppet doll and created quite a stir in Nepal:
The news about such a baby being brought to the hospital spread like wildfire and there were hundreds gathered at the hospital to have a look. The police had to be deployed to control the crowd.
Someone left a note on the Wikipedia page for
April 1, 2006 speculating that the child had
anencephaly (a neural tube defect which results in the absence of a major portion of the brain, skull, and scalp). This strikes me as plausible... more plausible than the idea that the baby shown in the picture is an elaborately crafted hoax. (Thanks to Sara for the link... She notes that it looks like a character from The Oblongs TV show.)
Comments
what's that saying? a face only a mother could love?
if my newborn were to look like that, I would not parade it around in a <bedpan> miniature bathtub thing all through town. where were they taking it? to the river to drown it?
my goodness...
ack.
nepal network url:
http://insn.org/
http://www-medlib.med.utah.edu/WebPath/PEDHTML/PED029.html
Anencephaly Information - Anencephaly is a congenital malformation that occurs in approximately one in one thousand pregnancies. Anencephaly is a neural tube defect, just as is spina bifida. Life expectancy for an anencephalic baby is just a few hours, sometimes a few days at most. As the malformation is usually detected during a pre-natal scan, parents are often confronted with a choice between life and death. A choice made with very little information of what is in store for them. It is with this in mind that we have made the choice to share the stories of the brief, but wonderful lifes of our anencephalic babies. I hope that it will be of help to you and impart courage.
http://www.anencephaly.net/
yes it seems wrong for me to make fun of the baby and im sorry, but we all have opinions.
at first i thought it was a hoax but then again, it could be real....
Mind, that doesn't stop anyone from trying to make a buck off it, gain publicity by it, or public sympathy.
There's a website, not for the squeamish, called 'My Dead Baby'. I'm not going to link to it, since a lot of the folks who put their kids up there are some pretty sad cases. It's a little like 'Munchausen by Proxy' (a *really* frightening and tragic mental health condition. Look it up, and be *scared*) combined with the parents showing their 'beautiful' baby for others to 'admire' (hint: putting a hydrocelaphic baby in a christening gown does not make it cute).
Trust me folks, as much as you'd love to think that outside the scope of human deformity, I've got twelve bucks ( the price of a ticket to the Mutter Museum http://www.collphyphil.org/mutter.asp )that says otherwise.
Why parade the baby through town? Who knows. Why do we, as Americans, do half of what we do? Why do many of us weep at wakes, while others laugh and tell happy stories? Cultural relativism; not to be judged.
This is what bothered me, though: (Quotation marks not mine)
(quote) The
Recently I read of a tribe of people that sees conjoined twins as the incarnation of the twin gods of fire and passion, and they are worshipped.(something like that anyway)
There is also a shrine in Pakistan that honors "rat children" which are severely retarted and malformed children. The children are given to the shrine to be used as beggars in exchange for blessings of fertility.
Some cultures feel that the handicapped are somehow blessed by or closer to God... it could be why they are parading the poor baby around.
Who are we to judge?
"Recently I read of a tribe of people that sees conjoined twins as the incarnation of the twin gods of fire and passion, and they are worshipped."
If this is true, I'd like to know more about it. What's the name of this tribe, and where do they live? There are cultures (the Yoruba of Nigeria, for example) who consider the birth of twins to be an exceptionally fortunate occurance, but I've never heard of one having a similar view of conjoined twins.
Since conjoined twins are quite rare, this tribe must either be quite large or have an exceptionally high rate of abnormal births if they see this phenomenon very often. Also, their medical technology must be fairly advanced, since it is my understanding that conjoined twins who are born alive are almost always delivered by caesarian section.
The Yoruba's neighbors, the Igbo, on the other hand, traditionally viewed the birth of twins as a communal disaster and they were frequently left to die (Chinua Achebe describes this in "Things Fall Apart"). However, an Igbo of my acquaintance tells me that this practice, and probably the underlying belief, died out several generations ago.
In the book "The Island of Bali," which was published in about 1930 or so (but is still well worth reading), Miguel Covarrubias says that the Balinese people were horrified by the birth of boy-and-girl fraternal twins, as they considered such a relationship incestuous. Such an event required an elaborate ritual to purify the village, and the twins' father was permitted to collect donations from all the neighbors (who were all expected to contribute) to pay for the ceremony.
All this is pretty far off topic, I guess, but interesting, I hope.
I did read the article link...and by the picture on the article, the baby's skin is mottled, just like a newborns. That's not really something that could be faked easily. Not with a computer, not with makeup...it looks like a real baby.
I'm going to go vomit now.
I have an interest in developmental biology, possibly morbid, but I find conjoined twins and other congenital defects scientifically interesting.
When i was fourteen I had an internship with a laboratory that was studying the development of chicken embryos... they would "knock out" certain genes, disabling them and see how it affected the developing chick. This helped them identify functions of genes and etc etc...
Really neat stuff when youre that young.. although I cant eat eggs anymore because of it..
Neural tube defects (Ancephaly, Spina Bifida) are often linked to a deficiency in folate in the mother's diet, just as an interesting tidbit of info. (and to stay somewhat on topic )
Okay, now I remember where I found it, gullible.info.. so the veracity of this information is questionable...
However there is a real tribe of people called the Guarani... and they do live in paraguay... however I cannot find anything that substantiates this claim.
I have yet to have figured out if gullible.info has any truth to the "Facts" posted.
I read so much on the net anymore that fact and fiction often become intertwined so I apologize if I was... um .. err.. gullible
I had nightmares my whole pregnancy. On the plus side, seeing those pictures ensured that I took my prenatal vitamins - and vitamins are something I'm woefully lax at remembering to take.
That still doesn't explain why that crowd is parading it around, though.
All the details are in the article in the link 😛
It's very unfortunate, and VERY real.
affecting human physiology and evolution,We have to wonder. But to parade a human through the streets like that certainly is terrible if it is real.
It's not just you, Andrew. It just amazes how many people are shocked that they had a sort of procession through the streets, (again, ahem, our culture is not superior to any other) yet no one is offended at people suggesting that it be taken to the river to drown, calling it a "freak-baby", and making star-wars references.
<sigh>
Sorry, I left my soap box too close to the computer today. Excuse me while I move it back to the other room.
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rls=GAPB,GAPB:2005-09,GAPB:en&q=Anencephaly&sa=N&tab=iw
I lost my little girl to anencephaly at 20 weeks gestation. I am a healthy mum to a little boy, and a wife.
You all should really be ashamed of yourselves.
It is NOTHING to sit there and joke about, and I seriously hope NONE of you have to go through what I have been through in the last month.