Baby's Baby

When 13-month-old Barbara Stobie's protruding abdomen grew so big that she seemed ready to give birth to a baby of her own, her young mother, wife of a southern Oregon timber worker, finally took her to a local doctor. He suggested that the baby go to the Doernbecher Memorial Hospital which the State of Oregon maintains in Portland as an adjunct of the University of Oregon medical school. There the blonde little caricature of motherhood underwent an X-ray examination a fortnight ago. This revealed to the dumbfounded staff of the hospital that Barbara Stobie was indeed carrying a child. Plainly visible were part of its bony skull, spine, arms, legs.

Last week Barbara Stobie was delivered of this monstrosity. As an artist and photographers recorded the scene, Surgeon Clarence William Brunkow made a seven-inch incision from the tip of her breast bone past the left of her navel. Lying horizontally within her abdomen, between the top of her stomach and her spine, was a skin-like sac. Segments of Barbara's bowels were fastened to this sac.

When he slit open the sac, the pink buttocks of a five-month fetus protruded. In attempting to lift out the fetus, Dr. Brunkow felt some resistance: the mon ster's head was attached to the sac. Dr. Brunkow cut this attachment and then found that the inclusion's liver, which had developed outside its body, was also attached to the sac. Another nick of a scalpel freed Barbara Stobie of her ab normal burden and permitted Dr. Brunkow to close her up. He left the skin-like sac within her, to be removed at some more favorable time.

As it lay in an enameled operating-room tray, the fetus seemed to be that of a boy. It measured seven inches and had patches of infant's down on its torso. It lacked a face, had part of a brain. Its right foot had six webbed toe buds, its left foot four. Its arms, fastened to its sides, had webbed finger buds. Fingers and toes had rudiments of nails. As Barbara Stobie went to her bed in a ward Pathologist Warren Clair Hunter of the University of Oregon medical school took the monstrous fetus to his laboratory to learn what was inside (a three months job) and to guess at how the brother ovum, from which it developed got inside the embryo which became Barbara Stobie 13 months ago.

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