Northern Ireland couple welcome ‘miraculous’ conjoined twins

Hannah and Dan Bateson welcomed twin girls six weeks ago at London’s University College Hospital.

Adorably named Annabelle and Isabelle are joined from the chest to the pelvis.

They share a liver, bladder and bowel, one shared fused leg and one leg each as well as separate hearts.

Their proud parents say they have defied the odds.

"They're miracles,” mum Hannah told ITV news.

“Miracle is the word we've used from the day we found out we were having them," she said.

"We got pregnant with the first cycle of our fertility treatment."

The couple’s journey to parenthood has been emotional and worrying as their first scan revealed there was something different about the pregnancy.

"You maybe go to a scan worried that there's something wrong. I think a normal feeling is to feel very nervous going to a scan, especially first pregnancies but we were both committed to it,” she said.

"You felt in limbo because we knew they were conjoined but we knew so little about the information about the extent of the conjoin.”

The twins will undergo separation surgery in May.

"Their wee bodies are different. The girls will have prosthetic legs, they'll have one leg each and a prosthetic leg each."

“We'll be coming back here [to the hospital in London] for the next 18 years,” Hannah continued.

“Which is a very scary thing to say but if we're coming back for the next 18 years, it means the girls survived."