18 Year Old Siamese Twins Want To Marry! (354 hits)
Hold onto your hats! It's every man's dream come true: twins! Looking for love! There's just one catch ... they only have one body.
Dicephalus twins Abigail and Brittany Hensel -- who have separate hearts, stomachs, lungs and spines but share reproductive organs -- are now 18. In addition to learning to drive and starting college, the twins say that they live a normal life and hope to get married.
In 2006, the Hensels appeared in "Joined for Life," a documentary in which they explained the particulars of their day-to-day lives. The film shows them helping around the house, attending school, and even playing basketball; they're able to get around with ease, having learned to coordinate their movements. Because they essentially share one body, separation of the twins would be dangerous and ultimately debilitating.
Despite their closeness, they have distinct personalities -- at six, Abby told Time that she wanted to be a dentist, while Brittany hoped for a career as a pilot. The Hensels' father, Mike, believes that a separation would prove to be too emotionally traumatic, and that there's no reason why the girls shouldn't marry someday, saying "They're good-looking girls. They're witty. They've got everything going for them, except they're together."
There's not much precedent for how a marriage to the twins would work, since the two are some of the only dicephalus twins to make it to their teen years. The condition is extremely rare -- fewer than one in 40,000 sets of twins are born conjoined, and even fewer survive into adolescence. Fortunately the girls have yet to show any of the heart or organ defects that doctors are worried about. So they may live yet to be the girls of some guy's (guys'?) dream.
