Conjoined twins Abby and Brittany Hensel answer questions everyone wants to know about their lives
Topics: Sex and Relationships, US News
Britt Jones
Featured Image Credit: Channel5/TLC
Topics: Sex and Relationships, US News
Everyone is asking the same questions about famous conjoined twins Abby and Brittany Hensel.
The sisters were born in 1990 and grew up sharing one body, all of their organs below the waist and their blood supply.
As they are probably the most famous conjoined twins thanks to their TLC show Abby and Brittany as well as appearing on the Oprah Winfrey Show, the public have a lot of questions for them.
Now, they’ve answered them after questions came in about how a relationship would work after Abby married Josh Bowling.
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"Having only the one guy makes it more confusing. What if they fight? What if one h/w set wants to divorce and the other doesn't?" one person questioned.
"One of the twins will be the legal spouse as far as the state is concerned. So it is theoretically possible that the other twin could someday decide to marry a different person," a Redditor suggested.
"But given the way they have had to harmonise their entire lives, I imagine they would find it easier to stick to being married to just one person."
The pair also revealed how they go about their daily lives.
Despite their fame, Abby and Brittany went on to obtain separate degrees from Bethel University and are elementary school teachers in their local town - with one salary between them.
Abby told the BBC: “Obviously right away we understand that we are going to get one salary because we're doing the job of one person.
“As maybe experience comes in we'd like to negotiate a little bit, considering we have two degrees and because we are able to give two different perspectives or teach in two different ways."
Brittany added: “One can be teaching and one can be monitoring and answering questions. So in that sense we can do more than one person."
As dicephalus conjoined twins, the women have separate hearts and heads but share essentially everything else.
Abby controls the right arm and leg of the body, while Brittany controls the left, but it doesn’t mean they have to do everything together.
In fact, when it comes to eating, the pair will sometimes have separate meals, and they actually have two digestive systems and two separate stomachs, but share the same bladder and excretion system, which means eating one meal between them more convenient.
To answer questions about their ability to drive, they explained that they passed their test on their 16th Birthday as Brittany explained: "Abby takes over the pedals and the shifter, we both steer, and I take over the blinker and the lights."
Their mother Patty added: "I don't know what would happen if they got pulled over for speeding.
"Would they each get a ticket or just Abby because it's her foot on the accelerator?"
More personal questions also slipped through as people wondered whether they could have children.
"That is probably something that could work because those organs do work for them," Patty explained in Joined For Life.
"Yeah, we're going to be moms," Brittany agreed.
She added: "The whole world doesn't need to know who we are seeing, what we are doing and when we are going to do it. But believe me, we are totally different people."