This is a sad case we come across sometimes. A mom is pregnant with twins and somewhere along the pregnancy one of the babies dies but the other one is still alive and perfectly normal. In a case like this, the obstetricians will monitor the mother to make sure she is safe and they will monitor the other baby to make sure he/she is ok. They will basically leave the dead baby in there until the pregnancy is over. As a PA looking at this placenta, that is exactly what we see. The side of the twin placenta with the blue arrow shows a very healthy looking viable term placenta that kept a normal baby alive throughout a pregnancy. The placenta on the red arrow side tells a different story. This placenta looks small and not term, as if it stopped growing weeks before the other side. It is also very dusky and dead looking with a shriveled up umbilical cord. This placenta does not look healthy at all and unfortunately was not enough to keep the other twin alive. When this mom went into labor, she delivered a healthy baby and the dead fetus was then removed at that time.
