Baby Rebecca Dies

After a complex 11-hour operation, baby Rebecca was doing fine, but something went wrong post op.

Earlier surgeons had said baby Rebeca Martinez was doing well after a complex 11-hour operation carried out by a team of 18 people on Friday.

Born with the head of an undeveloped conjoined twin fused to the top of her skull, she was thought to be the first such baby to survive beyond birth.

In the delicate operation, surgeons had to cut off undeveloped tissue, clip the veins and arteries and close Rebeca’s skull using a bone graft from another part of her body.

“She was too little to resist the surgery,” the baby’s mother Maria Gisela Hiciano told the Associated Press news agency from the hospital in Santo Domingo where surgery took place.

The team was led by Jorge Lazareff, who successfully separated Guatemalan conjoined twins in 2002.

Baby Rebecca suffered from a condition known as “Parasitic Twins”. The condition was recorded only eight time in history and the other seven babies died before birth. This condition would have limited the development of Rebecca’s brain, insuring some other type of handicap in the future.