A young мuм woman abused her baby after discovering that she was carrying a fetus resembling ᴍᴇʀᴍᴀɪᴅ in her ᴡᴏᴍʙ. The mother, Wu, 23, was six months pregnant when she went for examination in the central Chinese city of Yichang.

Scans showed that the fetus had no legs, but rather a tail-like growth. In addition, the fetus had no bladder and an atrophied liver, according to medical reports. Doctors at the hospital told Wu that the fetus suffered from a rare condition called sirenomelia, which is a rare congenital deformity in which the legs are fused, giving the appearance of a mermaid tail.

Despite carrying the fetus for half a year, Wu miscarried after specialists estimated the baby could only survive a few hours after birth. The causes behind mermaid syndrome are still a medical mystery, and it is said to occur once in every 100,000 pregnancies.

Shiloh Pepin, an American nicknamed “mermaid girl,” suffered one of the most documented cases of sirenomelia in the world. Despite undergoing 150 operations during her relatively short life, she died in 2009 at the age of 10. There are believed to be only two known survivors of mermaid syndrome in the world today.