A recent New York Times article presents the case for why it's justified to perform "selective reduction" when In-Vitro Fertilization results in "multiple success" or even with natural multiples -- that is, killing one or more babies in the womb to make life easier for the living.
For background, read Twins Reduced to Singleton by 'Choice'
UPDATE 8/22/11: "This isn’t meddling — it’s murder," opinion by Albert Mohler
-- From "The Two-Minus-One Pregnancy" by Ruth Padawer, New York Times 8/10/11
For all its successes, reproductive medicine has produced a paradox: in creating life where none seemed possible, doctors often generate more fetuses than they intend. In the mid-1980s, they devised an escape hatch to deal with these megapregnancies, terminating all but two or three fetuses to lower the risks to women and the babies they took home. But what began as an intervention for extreme medical circumstances has quietly become an option for women carrying twins. With that, pregnancy reduction shifted from a medical decision to an ethical dilemma. As science allows us to intervene more than ever at the beginning and the end of life, it outruns our ability to reach a new moral equilibrium. We still have to work out just how far we’re willing to go to construct the lives we want.
. . . secrecy is common among women undergoing reduction to a singleton. Doctors who perform the procedure, aware of the stigma, tell patients to be cautious about revealing their decision.
What is it about terminating half a twin pregnancy that seems more controversial than reducing triplets to twins or aborting a single fetus? After all, the math’s the same either way: one fewer fetus. . . .
Even some people who support abortion rights admit to feeling queasy about reduction to a singleton. . . .
It’s not only the parents who may feel guilty. Even if parents work hard to conceal it, the child may discover the full story of his or her origins, and we don’t know what feelings of guilt or vulnerability or loss this discovery might summon.
To read all of this very extensive article above, CLICK HERE.
From "When Two (or More) Become One: Selective Reduction for Multiple Births" by Courtney Hutchison, ABC News Medical Unit 8/15/11
Increased use of in vitro fertilization techniques has made [multiples] increasingly common. Given the high cost and failure rate of fertility treatments, some couples try to increase their chances of getting pregnant by using multiple embryos and end up facing an unexpected challenge of twins, triplets, or higher multiples -- a challenge some feel they cannot handle, emotionally or financially.
In cases of high multiple pregnancies, doctors will often recommend selective reduction for purely medical reasons. Early in the pregnancy, one or more of the fetuses are aborted from within the womb to increase the likelihood that the remaining babies (and the mother) will survive and thrive. There are numerous health concerns to both mother and infants associated with carrying multiples. Thus for decades obstetricians have offered the option of reducing down to twins, which tend to have safer outcomes. This procedure can only be done with fraternal twins, as identical twins share a placenta and cannot easily be separated.
In the past years, however, some obstetricians and their patients have turned to selective reductions even in the case of twins -- not necessarily for medical reasons, but because the couple does not feel emotionally and/or financially prepared to have two babies when they had planned to have just one.
To read the entire article above, CLICK HERE.
From "New York Times Touts 'Selective Reduction' as a 'Half Abortion'" by Steven Ertelt, LifeNews.com 8/10/11
“This tragic outcome would have been foreseeable when ‘choice’ became the ultimate god,” [Wendy Wright, the former president of Concerned Women for America] told LifeNews in response. “Yet I doubt that anyone conceived of something so horrible, that people would deliberately conceive children then deliberately abort them simply because they are children. Morality does not change with technology; the intensity of one’s moral decisions increase when beginning with the belief that ‘you can be like God.’”
Wright says the Times article “pulls back the curtain to reveal that women and doctors are choosing who to kill like a sniper decides who to shoot, based on short-term thinking, personal benefits and which victim is accessible. It begs us to question: when will hurting someone’s feelings by saying this is wrong become less important than valuing human life? Perhaps not until it is our own life at stake.”
To read the entire article above, CLICK HERE.
Also read IVF Babies Aborted: 'Oops, Changed My Mind'
