“I know Brittany would do it in a split second for me. And we’ve always shared everything, so why not this?”
Brittany and Cynthia Daniel have shared everything as identical twins and that hasn’t changed even to this day.
In an interview with People Magazine on Wednesday January 5, the twins revealed that Cynthia had donated her eggs to her sister Brittany after a battle with cancer and chemotherapy left her unable to have a viable pregnancy.
“We are so intertwined,” said Brittany. “Everything that’s hers is mine and everything that’s mine is hers.”
The twins rose to fame alongside each other on the hit show “Sweet Valley High” in the ’90s. When Brittany was diagnosed with stage IV non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, she learned that she may never be able to have children on her own.
Without hesitation, Cynthia decided to donate her eggs to her sister so Brittany could welcome her daughter Hope with husband Adam Touni on October 24, 2021.
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“I saw it as such a simple gift I could give to her,” Cynthia explained. “I know Brittany would do it in a split second for me. And we’ve always shared everything, so why not this?”
After their time on “Sweet Valley High”, the twin’s had diverged in their paths with Cynthia focusing on settling down and starting a family and Brittany pursuing her acting career. All that changed when Brittany was diagnosed with cancer and after a long hard recovery, the “White Chicks” actress changed her priorities.
“I remember thinking that I had a new lease on life,” she admitted. “I was ready to find a partner and have a child.”
After three unsuccessful rounds of in vitro fertilization (IVF) using her sister’s eggs, Brittany began to lose faith in her desire to become a mother.
“I thought I might have to wrap my head around not being a mom in this lifetime,” she remembered. “I fought so hard to get there, and I was so scared it wasn’t going to happen.”
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Eventually she and Touni looked into surrogacy using her sister’s egg and were both in the room for the birth of their baby girl.
“I just let out this primal cry,” Brittany said of meeting her daughter for the first time. “The entire room was bawling because they just all knew what we had been through.”
In December, Cynthia finally met her niece after self-quarantining. “I wasn’t sure how I was going to feel at first, what emotions would come up,” she stated. “But I just felt like the aunt. And that is really special.”
Although Brittany is thinking of expanding her family creating another embryo using Cynthia’s eggs, for now she described motherhood as “beautiful”.
She concluded. “It’s better than I ever thought it could be. My sister made my dreams come true.”
