SHE was 9in long when she was born and weighed under 8oz, about the weight of a fizzy drink can or a mobile phone.

She made her parents cry, lying there all wrinkly, hooked up to the wires and the oxygen, dwarfed by her incubator and less than half the size of her twin.

But Rumaisa Rahman, born 14 weeks early, battled for life and claimed her place yesterday in the record books as the smallest baby known to survive. She and her sister, Hiba, who weighed just 1lb 4oz at birth but is now a healthy 5lb, were delivered on September 19 by Caesarean section near Chicago.

Doctors took the agonising decision to deliver them at just twenty-five weeks and six days because their mother was suffering from such high blood pressure that her life, and the life of the twins she was carrying, were at risk.

The gamble paid off. Rumaisa, who is now 2lb 10oz — a respectable weight for a premature baby — broke a 15-year-old record set by a baby at the same hospital whose birth weight was just under 10oz.

Officials at the Loyola University Medical Centre in Maywood, Illinois, say that the twins are doing very well. Hiba, whose name means “gift from God”, could be home by Christmas, and her sister, whose name means “white as milk”, will probably follow her in the new year.

It was a happy ending to a rollercoaster year for the first-time parents Mahajabeen Shaik, 23, and Mohammed Abdul Rahman, 32, who married in India in January and quickly learnt that they were expecting twins.

The parents, originally from Hyderabad, were first allowed to hold the babies during their second month of life. Until then, they had only been able to touch them. “It was such a great feeling, to be able to hold my babies, touch them and kiss them,” the mother said.

She recalled her first glimpse of them the day after they were born. ”I was crying because they were both so small,” she said. “I was not expecting them to be so small.”

In their American home in the village of Hanover Park, Illinois, the mother learnt that she had developed pre-eclampsia, a condition that typically sets in after 20 weeks of gestation and complicates up to 7 per cent of pregnancies. It can stunt foetal growth and cause kidney failure and a string of other potentially fatal conditions in the mother. It is the third leading cause of pregnancy-related death. The only reliable treatment is delivery, which carries its own pitfalls.

Doctors prefer not to carry out Caesarean sections in such pregnancies because the baby already has a fight on its hands and the operation can carry risks for the newborn.

But things turned out well for the twins, who have had minimal interventions since.

They had laser surgery to correct vision problems typical among premature babies, but they are said to be thriving. Having started life on a drip, they are being exclusively bottle-fed and receiving minimal oxygen to help their underdeveloped lungs.

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