Conjoined Twins Abby and Brittany Hensel Beam in Photo With Husband
Conjoined twins Abby and Brittany Hensel have appeared radiant in a rare photo with Abby’s husband, Joshua Bowling.
In a selfie shared via Facebook last month by Bowling, the sisters, both 34, are seen smiling alongside Bowling, who married Abby in a secret ceremony in 2021.
The happy snap is currently Bowling’s profile photo on the social media platform. The sisters’ own Facebook profile photo also currently features Bowling.
In Bowling’s photo, he is sporting a winter jacket over a purple shirt while the sisters are wearing a black shirt.
Bowling, a military veteran, has kept his Facebook followers up to date with the family’s activities, sharing a video of pumpkin-shaped sourdough bread on October 2. “#SourdoughSistersBread,” he captioned the clip.
The social media updates come after Abby and Brittany, who have attracted the spotlight since 1996, slammed criticism over their lives by posting a video via social media earlier this year. “This is a message to all the haters out here,” a deep voice was heard saying over a March 29 TikTok video that featured photos of Abby and Brittany with Bowling. “If you don’t like what I do but watch everything I’m doing, you’re still a fan.”
The siblings captioned the post, “#Forever.”
Abby and Bowling’s marriage was confirmed in March, which sparked social media trolls to take to various platforms with speculative questions about the nature of Abby’s marriage.
The siblings, who live in Minnesota, shed significant light on their extraordinary journey in the documentary Joined For Life, released in December 2006. The pair chronicled their 16th birthday in 2008 and TLC greenlit the Abby & Brittany docuseries in 2012, when they were 22 years old.
Abby and Brittany are dicephalic parapagus twins, which describes a rare form of partial twinning where two heads are connected to one torso. Abby and Brittany share a bloodstream and all organs below the waist. Each twin also controls one arm and leg. (Abby is the left-side conjoined twin, while Brittany is the right.)
After the twins were born in 1990, their parents opted against a separation surgery after they learned through doctors that it was unlikely that both sisters would survive the procedure.
They pursued a career as elementary school teachers, with their mother, Patti Hensel, telling the camera during an episode of Abby & Brittany, “I remember one wanted to be a pilot and one wanted to be a dentist and that was short-lived. I think it’s going to go well for them [working as teachers] because they’ve just always had a knack with kids and kids have always kind of been drawn to them.”