Abby and Brittany Hensel, who documented their lives in the TLC reality series “Abby & Brittany,” have a new member of the family.
Conjoined twins Abby and Brittany Hensel first gained national attention when they appeared on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” in 1996.
Now the sisters have reached a major life milestone: Abby is married.
The Hensels later starred in the feel-good TLC reality series “Abby and Brittany,” which showed them driving, traveling to Europe and even riding a moped. When the show ended after one season, Abby and Brittany had just graduated from college with degrees in education.
A lot has happened in the last decade. Abby, 34, is now married. According to public records, Abby, a teacher, and Josh Bowling, a nurse and United States Army veteran, tied the knot in 2021. The sisters also shared photos of the wedding on social media. The couple live in Minnesota, where the Hensels were born and raised.
One in 200,000 births results in conjoined twins? That seems way higher than I thought.
Yes but this is muuuch rarer because its a very clean case of it. Most of them pass away in early childhood.
And I think some can be surgically separated.
I’d imagine most are a lot more minor than this. Baby is born with a small growth that turns out to be a malformed limb of an incomplete/reabsorbed twin, doctors remove it quickly after birth, and the baby goes on to live a normal life.
I’ve heard of there being chimera people as well who go through most of their life assuming they’re perfectly normal until they learn that their DNA in one part of their body doesn’t match their DNA in another part of their body.
I’m sure it’s been done, but your explanation of a chimera person sounds like a great idea for some kind of detective novel or something.
My memory is hazy, but I recall there being a story from years back of a mother who ended up in a bit of a legal dispute because her child was DNA tested and determined to not be hers, because part of her reproductive organs were actually those of an unformed sororal twin.
Edit: found it.
I was just talking to my son about that lady yesterday.
CSI had an episode where they were tracking down all of a suspect’s siblings & it turned out the killer was a chimera.
It’s actually happened in real life… Woman had a baby that doctors later swore was not hers because the DNA of her uterus didn’t match the rest of her.
https://embryo.asu.edu/pages/case-lydia-fairchild-and-her-chimerism-2002
A lot of them die in infancy, so you don’t see them around.