Young mum aborts her baby after discovering she was carrying a mermaid-like foetus in her womb
Scans showed her unborn child did not have any legs, but instead had a tail-like growth
A YOUNG mum aborted her baby after discovering she was carrying a mermaid-like foetus in her womb.
The mum, 23-year-old Wu, was six months pregnant when she went to be examined in Yichang City, central China.
Scans showed her unborn child did not have any legs, but instead had a "tail" like growth.
The foetus also did not have a bladder and had a stunted liver, reports said.
Doctors at the hospital told Wu the foetus was suffering from a rare condition called sirenomelia - "Mermaid Syndrome" - a rare congenital deformity in which the legs are fused together, giving them the appearance of a mermaid's tail.
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Despite carrying the child for half a year, Wu aborted the foetus after specialists estimated the baby would only be able to survive for a few hours after birth.
The causes behind Mermaid Syndrome are still a medical mystery, and it is said to only occur once in every 100,000 pregnancies.
What is the mermaid tail?
Sirenomelia is a term referring to an extremely rare congenital disorder which sees infants born with partial or completely fused legs. The developmental disorder is also known as Mermaid Syndrome as the babies often appear to have a tail. According to the National Organization for Rare Disorders the disorder is estimated to occur in 1 in 60,000 to 100,000 births and is often fatal for newborns. Only a few known cases of patients have managed to make it past infancy. More than half of reported cases of sirenomelia result in stillbirth, the National Center for Biotechnology Information has revealed. The cause of the disorder is unknown but research has suggested environmental and genetic factors can play a role.
Shiloh Pepin, an American dubbed "Mermaid Girl", suffered one of the world's most documented cases of sirenomelia.
Despite undergoing 150 operations during her relatively short lifetime, she died in 2009 at the age of 10.
There are thought to be only two known survivors of Mermaid Syndrome in the world today.