PrimeTime: Survival of One Conjoined Twin

Dec. 14 -- It’s a gesture from a hand so small that it barely wraps around her father’s finger. The tiny hand belongs to “Jodie,” a baby who is alive only because her twin sister is dead. And the question over whether to save one infant at the cost of the other’s life put their parents and doctors at odds over a heart-wrenching dilemma.

Jodie and Mary — these are the names used in the court cases and the media to protect the babies’ identities — were born Aug. 8, locked together at the spine. They were conjoined, or Siamese, twins — a condition so rare that it occurs just once in a quarter to half a million births.

A Terrible Dilemma

Doctors determined that Mary was being kept alive by Jodie’s heart and lung. But supporting Mary was too much strain for Jodie. Surgery to separate the twins would mean certain death for Mary, but it would be the best chance for Jodie, doctors said. Without surgery, both would die.

Doctors decided that the best course would be to separate the girls and try to save Jodie. When they asked permission to perform the operation, parents Michaelangelo and Rina Attard refused.

“I can’t accept that one of them [has] to die to save the other one because they are both our daughters,” Michaelangelo Attard, known as Michael for short, recalls in an interview being broadcast tonight on ABCNEWS’s Primetime Thursday.

The Attards, Roman Catholics from the Maltese island of Gozo who came to England for their children’s birth, opposed the surgery on religious grounds. In the couple’s home town, about 60 miles south of Sicily in the Mediterranean, live revolves around the Catholic Church.

When the parents refused the operation, the case was referred to the British High Court, which ruled that the surgery would go forward without their consent. In a 20-hour operation last month, the twins were separated and Mary died.

‘We Always Had Faith’