Married Twins

[Badger]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7182817.stm

A pair of twins who were adopted by separate families as babies got married without knowing they were brother and sister, a peer told the House of Lords.

A court annulled the UK couple's union after they discovered their true relationship, Lord Alton said.

The peer - who was told of the case by a High Court judge involved - said the twins felt an "inevitable attraction".

He said the case showed how important it was for children to be able to find out about their biological parents.

'Truth will out'

Details of the of the identities of the twins involved have been kept secret, but Lord Alton said the pair did not realise they were related until after their marriage.

The former Liberal Democrat MP raised the couple's case during a House of Lords debate on the Human Fertility and Embryology Bill in December.

"They were never told that they were twins," he told the Lords.

"They met later in life and felt an inevitable attraction, and the judge had to deal with the consequences of the marriage that they entered into and all the issues of their separation."

He told the BBC News website that their story raises the wider issue of the importance of strengthening the rights of children to know the identities of their biological parents .

"If you start trying to conceal someone's identity, sooner or later the truth will out," he said.

"And if you don't know you are biologically related to someone, you may become attracted to them and tragedies like this may occur."


You have got to be pretty unlucky for that to happen!

 

[tedebear]

Damn lucky they never had kids.....aren't brothers and sisters allowed to marry in some countries?

Aside from the complete weirdness of it all, whats the main reasons siblings can't marry? Mongoloidism? or is it something else....

 

[Wardy]

So you meet someone, get talking and find out that you have the same birthday. You talk some more and find out that you were both adopted. And you do not even think that you may be releated?

 

[The Large One]

Another, not dis-similar story about twins...

Twins reunited, after 35 years apart

To meet them today you would imagine that they had known each other all their lives. They share an easy intimacy that belies the fact that identical twins Elyse Schein and Paula Bernstein spent their first 35 years in total ignorance of the other's existence.

They were given up for adoption to separate families as part of an experiment in the US to discover how identical twins would react to being raised in different family backgrounds. Neither set of adoptive parents knew the babies were part of a study or that they had been born twins.

The research project took place under the guidance of a leading US child psychologist with the co-operation of prestigious New York adoption agency Louise Wise Services. It wasn't until Elyse Schein contacted the agency in 2003 to find out more details about her birth that the truth began to emerge.

"I received a letter that said: 'You were born on 9th October 1968 at 12.51 pm, the younger of twin girls.' It was unbelievable. Suddenly another element of my identity was revealed to me. Suddenly I was a twin."

When the agency contacted Elyse's newly discovered older sister Paula, the two women were quite quickly in touch and arranged to meet in a cafe in New York. "Walking every step to that cafe felt momentous," says Paula. "I felt like this is it. From now on my life will forever be different."

When Paula saw Elyse for the first time, she was pleased to see that as similar as they looked, each was unique. Elyse had just returned from working in Paris. "She looked very European," says Paula. "She had dark glasses on and was smoking a cigarette. She looked ultra cool. She was an alternative version of me. It was a relief I think for both of us that we were not carbon copies. As similar as we looked when we compared pictures of ourselves as kids, as adults we have our own distinct style."

"We both felt like asking: 'So what have you done with this body, with this DNA?'" says Elyse, "Or, 'So what have you been up to since we shared a womb?' We had the same favourite book and the same favourite film, Wings of Desire," says Elyse. "It was amazing," says Paula. "We felt we were conducting our own informal study on nature versus nurture in a way".

Having lost 35 years of shared experiences, the twins wanted to confront Dr Peter Neubauer about what had happened to them - although they discovered they had been dropped quite early on from the twins study. At first he refused to speak to them but eventually agreed to a meeting. "It was quite surreal," says Paula, who recalls her twin sister's feelings that "we were his kind of 'lab rats' coming back to see the great doctor. We had all these questions for him. But he was very quick to turn the tables and it was clear that he was seeing this as an opportunity to continue his study," she says. "He wanted to see how we turned out and question us about our development."

Neither Paula nor Elyse feel they have received answers to all the questions they have. And the records of the study are sealed until 2066.

"It was obviously about nature versus nurture," says Paula. "But there were other issues that we thought they might have been interested in, one of them being about the hereditariness of mental illness."

And from their researches, the twins have learnt that their birth mother did spend part of her life in psychiatric care. Nor do the women feel that they got what they wanted from Dr Neubauer. "I really was hoping that he would take responsibility for what he had done so many years ago," says Elyse. "He refuses to be open to the possibility that they were wrong," says Paula. "No matter what, we can't make up for the 35 years that we lost. We are different people because of being separated. We don't regret the lives we've led, but meeting each other and the difficulties that we faced in our relationship, the absurdity of having to get to know a twin who was essentially a stranger is very painful. Finding each other has been challenging as well as joyful. "For my husband and my brother too," says Paula, "you know in some ways I think it was a threat to them. My brother and I were always on an equal footing. We were both adopted and didn't know any biological siblings. And now suddenly I'm a twin. And who could be closer to someone than a twin? What's funny is we've kind of come full circle," says Elyse. "We were initially twins, which was a biological bond, and then now I say that we've adopted each other. Now we're family by choice."

 

[Barnet Seagull]

So you meet someone, get talking and find out that you have the same birthday. You talk some more and find out that you were both adopted. And you do not even think that you may be releated?

I guess lack of intelligence is genetic.

 

[Barrel of Fun]

Another, not dis-similar story about twins...

Twins reunited, after 35 years apart

To meet them today you would imagine that they had known each other all their lives. They share an easy intimacy that belies the fact that identical twins Elyse Schein and Paula Bernstein ...

Ah yes, in the Observer the other day. They looked much like characters from Dark Crystal, which I found strangely arousing.

 

[Questions]

I guess lack of intelligence is genetic.

Are Simster and Les Biehn related then.

 

[csider]

Must be sad for them, meeting the love of your life.......boning her ragged and then only to find out its your sister, errrgghhhh!!

 

[Skint Gull]

This will happen more and more with the amount of kids being born off one night stands. Give it 20 years and kids with 12 fingers will be the norm!

 

[Les Biehn]

I like the way the judge says this makes it clear that adopted children should know more about their natural parents, as if somehow twins are getting it on all over the place without realising they are related. And what about this inevitable attraction bullshit, what is he saying that all siblings want to bone each other? That siblings are unlikely to either dislike or just plain old like each other?

 

[Beach Hut]

Damn lucky they never had kids.....aren't brothers and sisters allowed to marry in some countries?

I believe this is fashionable in Croydon

 

[Badger]

Damn lucky they never had kids.....aren't brothers and sisters allowed to marry in some countries?

Aside from the complete weirdness of it all, whats the main reasons siblings can't marry? Mongoloidism? or is it something else....

That would make your mother your mother-in-law

 

[Jimmy Grimble]

You dont reckon they did it do you

 

[Theatre of Trees]

So you meet someone, get talking and find out that you have the same birthday. You talk some more and find out that you were both adopted. And you do not even think that you may be releated?

But isn't this what they are saying in that article? Both knew they were adopted but neither had ever been told that they were originally born as a twin.

 

[Lady Whistledown]

So you meet someone, get talking and find out that you have the same birthday. You talk some more and find out that you were both adopted. And you do not even think that you may be releated?

But neither knew they had a twin, did they?

The coincidences were probably part of the attraction- shared experiences of adoption, that kind of stuff. They probably thought they were soulmates.

Sad story really, not to mention rather creepy, even though it's obviously not their fault.

 

[Stat Brother]

I have experience of this, and I very much doubt such a thing could happen nowadays.

The procedures and practices, in place now, are so unbelievably pro child & birth parent that such 'secrets' would be impossible to keep.

 

[DC Rules]

Does anyone know how they actually found out they were twins? no mention of that in the article

 

[Questions]

As they say in Croydon, ''The family that lay together stay together.''

 

[seagullsovergrimsby]

Damn lucky they never had kids.....aren't brothers and sisters allowed to marry in some counties ?

Yes , Norfolk is one of them.

 

[The Clown of Pevensey Bay]

As they say in Croydon, ''The family that lay together stay together.''

As Homer Simpson said: The family the eats together, sleeps together!