The baby with two faces

Yes, I love these kinds of stories. And this one is both a doozy and heartwarming:

A baby with two faces was born in a northern Indian village, where

she is doing well and is being worshipped as the reincarnation of a

Hindu goddess, her father said Tuesday.

The baby, Lali,

apparently has an extremely rare condition known as craniofacial

duplication, where a single head has two faces. Except for her ears,

all of Lali’s facial features are duplicated — she has two noses, two

pairs of lips and two pairs of eyes.

“My daughter is fine — like any other child,” said Vinod Singh, 23, a poor farm worker.

Lali

has caused a sensation in the dusty village of Saini Sunpura, 25 miles

east of New Delhi. When she left the hospital, eight hours after a

normal delivery on March 11, she was swarmed by villagers, said Sabir

Ali, the director of Saifi Hospital.

“She drinks milk from her two mouths and opens and shuts all the four eyes at one time,” Ali said.

Naturally the story is being linked all around the blogosphere, but this post, from Fracas, struck me as particularly appropriate:

I couldn’t help but think to myself, how different things would be had

she been born here in Canada or the United States. Chances are, the

first thought would have been horror, followed by an immediate, “Who

and where can we have this surgically corrected?” We who worship

celebrity, perfection and a media that insists on impressing upon our

own young that if their nose is less than perfect, they must fix it; if

their boobs are not big enough they must inflate them… and we who

choose to irrationally believe that all the “beautiful people” on

magazines are actually that perfect without any help from the re-touch

artist, would no doubt be traumatized to have given birth to a child

with two sets of eyes, two noses and two pairs of lips.

No kidding. It remains to be seen how healthy Lali will remain but right now, she’s pretty damn beautiful.