Are Siamese twins one person or two? One individual or two?

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wow, a fast 1 star!

the one star person couldn't type so they used the star system to say that they are 1 alike

I will say each are individual

Can be either, depended on the nature of the condition in a particular case.

Each individual if they don’t share a brain, if they share one brain then it’s one person with 2 bodies.

5* to offset the 1

Biologically they are two persons who are joined, and if there are two heads, two consciousnesses, it's two persons/souls.

But that is actually an interesting legal/government registration question I have thought about, but I would assume it's recorded as 2 persons.

There are interesting articles on the net about criminal responsibility for the acts of conjoined person(s).

OP: careful about asking questions like that... it's how new genders are created these days!

But, legally they're still considered two individual persons with different names and birth certificates... unless as mentioned above there is a shared brain. However, since survival into adulthood is fairly rare in those cases socially it becomes a moot point. BTW: twins that share a common Brain are said to be "Craniopagus."

Since the brain controls the entire body, the legal principle is very similar to the ones that define when a patient can be declared "brain dead"; and it's same general concept even though the conjoined twins may still be very much alive.

Legally, it's already dicey with just cojoined twins since there is almost always a "dominant" individual and yet the needs -and legal rights- of each must be considered which requires that both agree to a surgical separation. But when there is a single brain it becomes legally impossible to "separate" the two intellects. And if that surgery cannot be performed without irreparable damage to one/both, it becomes a judicial -and moral- nightmare.

And it also quickly becomes even more complex if it's necessary to surgically separate those twins due to a terminal illness of just one of them. Is it medically ethical to kill one to save the other while risking the lives of both? Most Doctors would probably agree that it is worth that risk.

But I've never heard of a single case that's ever been adjudicated that involved cranially-cojoined twins who by themselves elected to be separated ... again, possibly because most of those unfortunates don't live past childhood. A blessing in itself!

Last Edited by GSB/LTD on 01/25/2023 11:19 AM