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.

  • jordanlund@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    People are getting so hung up on the sex angle, but the ramifications are more interesting. What if one of them wants to get pregnant but the other doesn’t? One consents to go through labor and delivery but the other doesn’t?

    This is all incredibly complex, but you know if Chang and Eng could make it work…

    https://www.ncpedia.org/biography/bunker-twins

    "They lived together in one house for nine years, but their wives began to quarrel. Starting in 1852, Sarah and Adelaide lived in separate houses. Chang and Eng agreed to reside in one house for three days, in which that brother made all the decisions without question. They spent the next three days at the other twin’s house, where he made all the decisions. The Bunkers faithfully held to this arrangement the rest of their lives.

    The twins returned to touring between 1849 and 1870 to support their large families. Chang and Adelaide had ten children, and Eng and Sarah had eleven children."

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Everything I’ve read or seen about them shows that they unsurprisingly have a lot of ways of coping with each other when they disagree, even when it is a major disagreement. What’s interesting is that they use “I” as a single entity when they agree and consider each other separate entities when they don’t.

      I don’t know what both think about pregnancy, but they’re school teachers, so they definitely like kids. I wonder if pregnancy is even a possibility? Or maybe unwise if their condition is genetic.

        • dev_null@lemmy.ml
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          8 months ago

          I remember my school teachers telling us they don’t have kids because they have enough of kids in their job, which makes perfect sense for me.

      • jordanlund@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        The closest anyone says is that they share a single set of reproductive organs and are a single entity “below the waist”.

        Any obstetrician worth their degree would probably consider it a high risk pregnancy due to all the unknown factors. How would an epidural work, for example? No clue. Pregnancy is a stressful event under normal circumstances, no clue what would happen here.

        In the Chang and Eng case, the twins were brothers who impregnated separate sisters, so the pregancies themselves were normal (despite being 21 or 22 of them).

        • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          It may not even be possible for them to get pregnant. Who knows how functional those reproductive organs are?

      • Pretzilla@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        Great use case for adoption

        (As should be always considered and promoted anyway since overpopulation is rapidly killing the planet)

    • fathog@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      That article is a ride. All sweet stuff until

      The twins prospered and moved to Surry County, where they came to own more than one thousand acres of land and twenty-eight enslaved people.

      Wild

      • jordanlund@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        I know, right? Conjoined twins in then Siam (Thailand), essentially sold into slavery, smuggled out of the country, then established as slave owners themselves… and having 21 children between them…

        There’s a movie to be made there.