!!!!
An ultrasound
Half-Aborted
Why do “reductions” of twin pregnancies trouble pro-choicers?
By William Saletan
Posted Tuesday, Aug. 16, 2011, at 9:12 AM ET
SLATE
An ultrasoundWhat’s worse than an abortion? Half an abortion.
It sounds like a bad joke. But it’s real. According to Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, demand is rising for “reduction” procedures in which a woman carrying twins keeps one and has the other aborted. Since twin pregnancies are generally safe, these abortions are largely elective.
Across the pro-choice blogosphere, including Slate, the article has provoked discomfort. RH Reality Check, a website dedicated to abortion rights, ran an item voicing qualms with one woman’s reduction decision. Jezebel, another pro-choice site, acknowledged the “complicated ethics” of reduction. Frances Kissling, a longtime reproductive rights leader, wrote a Washington Post essay asking whether women should forgo fertility treatment rather than risk a twin pregnancy they’d end up half-aborting.
In comments on these articles, pro-choice readers express similar misgivings. “Even as a woman who has terminated a pregnancy, I totally understand the author’s apprehension … something about it just doesn’t feel right,” says a Slate reader. A commenter at Jezebel writes that “if I were put in the position and decided to/needed to abort a single fetus, I could. But if I knew that I was keeping the baby and it turned out to be twins, I don’t think I could have a reduction.”
To pro-lifers and hardcore pro-choicers, this queasiness seems odd. After all, a reduction is an abortion. If anything, reduction should be less problematic than ordinary abortion, since one life
For some, the issue seems to be a consumer mentality in assisted reproduction. For others, it’s the deliberateness of getting pregnant, especially by IVF, without being prepared to accept the consequences. But the main problem with reduction is that it breaches a wall at the center of pro-choice psychology. It exposes the equality between the offspring we raise and the offspring we abort.
Look up any abortion-related item in Jezebel, and you’ll see the developing human referred to as a fetus or pregnancy. But when the same entity appears in a non-abortion item, it gets an upgrade. A blood test could help “women who are concerned that they may be carrying a child with Down’s Syndrome.” A TV character wonders whether she’s “capable of carrying a child to term.” Nuclear radiation in Japan “may put unborn children at risk.”
This bifurcated mindset permeates pro-choice thinking. Embryos fertilized for procreation are embryos; embryos cloned for research are “activated eggs.” A fetus you want is a baby; a fetus you don’t want is a pregnancy. Under federal law, anyone who injures or kills a “child in utero” during a violent crime gets the same punishment as if he had injured or killed “the unborn child’s mother,” but no such penalty applies to “an abortion for which the consent of the pregnant woman … has been obtained.”
Reduction destroys this distinction. It combines, in a single pregnancy, a wanted and an unwanted fetus. In the case of identical twins, even their genomes are indistinguishable. You can’t pretend that one is precious and the other is just tissue. You’re killing the same creature to which you’re dedicating your life.
Sophie’s Choice is a common theme in abortion decisions. To give your existing kids the attention and resources they’ll need, you have to terminate your fetus. This rationale fits the pro-choice calculus that born children are worth more than unborn ones. But in the case of reduction, the child for whom you’re reserving attention and resources is equally unborn. She is, and will always be, a living reminder of what you exterminated.
This is what tortures pro-choicers. “I just couldn’t sleep at night knowing that I terminated my daughter’s perfectly healthy twin brother,” says a commenter in the Times story. A Jezebel reader worries about “all the poor surviving twins who will one day find out that their other is missing.” Another Jezebel reader writes:
I’d have a much easier time aborting a single baby or both twins than doing a reduction. When you reduce, the remaining twin will remain a persistent reminder of the unborn child. I think that, more than anything would make killing that fetus feel like killing another human, even though it wasn’t fully developed. It would feel that way because you would have a living copy of the person you killed.
That’s the anguish of reduction: watching the fetus you spared become what its twin will never be. And knowing that the only difference between them was your will.
William Saletan is Slate’s national correspondent and author of Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War. Follow him on Twitter here.
COMMENTS:
mike
The use of the term “reduction” to describe the aborting of one fetus while letting his twin brother or sister live is disgusting to me. It reminds me of the Hatcheries and Conditioning Centers in Huxley’s Brave New World where children are created and “decanted.” It find it frightening that we use language such as this to mask and reassure our darkest actions.
Today, 11:29:20
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Steven Robinson
Its best if you can have triplets or quads, that way a woman can choose the desired gender as well as the most genetically fit offspring for actual birth.
Today, 11:26:55
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Bekah
This makes me angry. Women who are in the last years of their fertility, or waited until the last minute to have kids and have to turn to IVF, are FULLY AWARE of the potential to birth multiples and babies with defects. Why are we condoning their tardiness/selfishness to put their own needs first because more than one baby doesn’t fit into their carefully crafted agenda? You chose to have babies later or to use IVF… you can live with your choices just as any other person who had their children early/unexpectedly but made life amendments in order to make room for that child.
I can support abortion to a degree, but certainly not under these circumstances. I conceived my twins naturally and before I got all my ducks in a row, but never did it cross my mind that I should get rid of one because it made my life just a little easier!
Today, 10:17:22
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monchichi6
very messed up. not okay. ugh. people.
Today, 10:01:05
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Agnès Missonnier
I am indeed pro-choice but there are limit to what is “do-able”. Either you want a baby or babies if that is the case, you don’t get to say, well, I just want one or two, keep the rest. In that case a baby is just a article you choose like a pair of shoes or a color-coordinated cat to go with your home decoration… soon you will choose the sex, hair color et al of the baby!
Just like late term abortion (and I mean late term, ie over 6 months), except for serious medical reasons (same either the mother’s health is in danger or the baby is very sick) I am against it. A 2 or 4 months fetus is not viable while a later term abortion usually happen when the baby is viable (if healthy).
The law gave a frame to abortion (and abortion is as old as humanity and there is nothing against it in any religious book as it has been a fact of life for women since time untold) and it has been saving the life of thousands of women (who would have had abortion without it in very bad medical conditions or given up kids) it did not say do whatever you want without limit (proof is the time limit!).
Today, 11:13:53
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Rick Snee
And the worst part? Not knowing if you killed the evil twin until their goatee starts growing in.
Today, 08:59:46
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Nicole Paramecium
monchichi6
Jen P.
Erica Larner
I care because while it is our right to have an abortion, I don’t celebrate when one happens. I can’t think of anyone who is excited to get an abortion. It is a heart-wrenching, agonizing decision and would be best for everyone and both sides of the debate if there were fewer abortions needed. Not restricting availability to abortions, just trying to have fewer women who need to make that choice. If we can all work harder to take personal responsibility for our actions, then there is less pain for potential mothers, fathers, whoever. I strongly feel that everyone should do their best to avoid an unwanted pregnancy. If it happens, well, I fully support a woman’s right to terminate. But it is completely reasonable to advocate for better birth control methods and more responsible choices. Preventing unintended pregnancies is something liberals like me advocate for all the time.
Today, 09:53:17
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Bridget Mount
What honest reflection. How truly tragic the abortion industry is. How true that the only difference between the mother who grieves a loss of a child she miscarried and a woman who suffers from the loss of a child to abortion, is our weak and sinful human will. Thank God for His mercy, that covers our sins, and heals all our wounds.
Immaculate heart of Mary, pray for us.
Praise be Jesus.
Today, 08:12:55
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Agnès Missonnier
“Abortion industry”? A miscarriage is not chosen, an abortion is and it is not a sin. God has nothing to do with it or anything else.
Today, 08:40:29
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Erica Larner
Joshua Northey
Joshua Northey
You honestly think god has anything to do with it? Do you still believe in Santa too? How about the tooth fairy and the easter bunny? god…heh Next thing you know you are going to tell me me than orcs and elves are real.
Today, 09:54:09
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Juliette Dalrymple
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The Human Cost of ‘Selective Reduction’
Thirty years ago, I was in the ninth month of my second pregnancy when I received what was a very unsettling referral for a sonogram, which was not nearly as routine in those days. My eyes never once left the technician’s face as she studied the monitor. You can imagine my doubled apprehension as she left the room without offering me the small mercy of that nonchalant, “everything-is-normal-and-on-track” smile. When the OB-GYN followed her back into the room moments later, I really needed him to compensate for the technician’s serious breach of sonogram etiquette. Instead, he informed me that I was pregnant with twins.
I left that appointment just as frightened as every other woman who has ever received the same news. At the time, I already had a 23-month-old daughter; my financial resources, while not as limited as those of many new mothers, were light years away from reassuring; and my mental preparations had been for one baby, not two.
As the news began to sink in over the following few days, however, my fear got some competition from a growing awareness of my personal strength. I was still terrified, naturally, but on some level I made a decision to battle that fear, to refuse to let it take me without a fight. I remember throwing open the phone book (the Google of the ’80s), and aggressively tracking down the contact information for the local Twins & Multiples club.
In “The Two Minus One Pregnancy” article in The New York Times Magazine (Aug. 14), Ruth Padawer interviews women who, after becoming pregnant with twins using fertility drugs and procedures, decide to undergo a selective reduction. The women describe with illuminating candor their fears of the challenges of birthing two newborns at once; of not being the best mother they can be to all of their children, including those already born; of being spread too thin. And so they abort one of the twins.
The story begins:
As Jenny lay on the obstetrician’s examination table, she was grateful that the ultrasound tech had turned off the overhead screen. She didn’t want to see the two shadows floating inside her. Since making her decision, she had tried hard not to think about them, though she could often think of little else. She was 45 and pregnant after six years of fertility bills, ovulation injections, donor eggs and disappointment — and yet here she was, 14 weeks into her pregnancy, choosing to extinguish one of two healthy fetuses, almost as if having half an abortion. As the doctor inserted the needle into Jenny’s abdomen, aiming at one of the fetuses, Jenny tried not to flinch, caught between intense relief and intense guilt.
The women’s honesty allows no confusion about what’s making their decision for them: fear.
It’s scary to be carrying twins; scarier to think about the labor that will bring these twins into the world; scarier still to contemplate “Now what?” Without these Orwellian choices open to mothers of this generation, we answered the question “Now what?” one sleepless night at a time.
So when I brought my twin girls home back in 1980, I took it one day at a time. Scratch that, I took it one action at a time. I made that nightly pilgrimage to the nursery with tired eyes and tired feet. Constant feedings and changings, yes, but accompanied all the while by the twins’ mutual gazes, touches, and gurgling “twin talk.” Exhausting days and nights, but ones that I would never trade away. I still look with personal pride on the technique I developed to feed the twins with two pillows — my home-grown version of Boppies. There were fun trips to the Mall to share my joys and accomplishments with the countless strangers who would smile and approach the twins and their beaming older sister. There were joyful milestones of birthday parties, school events, sports, and dancing lessons. My burdens grew easier with time, too, as the twins grew up entertaining and supporting each other, sharing experiences that only twins can share. And I got some unique life training that I could later bring to my career life: No one learns how to multitask with efficiency like a parent of twins.
Maybe our lives would have been easier had I “reduced” my pregnancy, but we would have missed the crazy magic of those early years.
I can’t put myself in the shoes of a woman who decided for a selective reduction, but I can imagine that her decision stays with her always, perhaps evoking one emotion one day, another the next. Decisions made out of personal powerlessness and lack of support are the decisions that no one wants to make. And they’re the decisions that refuse to let you rest, the puzzles that you try to solve and resolve for the rest of your life.
These decisions born of fear and powerlessness will probably always exist in one form or another, but does that mean we should all simply raise the white flag on this issue? That physicians should abandon their vow “to do no harm” because twins cost more money to raise?
I propose that all of us — the medical profession as well as society at large — make a collective decision to fight the fear. Let’s not abandon these women in the cynical belief that there’s not enough support for all of them.
— Janet Morana is the executive director of Priests for Life, co-founder of the Silent No More Awareness Campaign, and co-host of The Catholic View for Women on EWTN.
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| ‘Selective Reduction’ and Self-Indulgence
While I very much appreciate Janet Morana’s compassionate words regarding the “fear and powerlessness” many women feel when faced with a multiple pregnancy, I’m afraid the issue is much more about self-indulgence. While I don’t doubt that many women feel exactly the emotions Ms. Morana described, the profiles of selective reduction in the New York Times article itself are much more damning. There’s the 45-year-old woman who endured six years of fertility treatments and couldn’t imagine handling twins; women who want one child (and one child only) with a new spouse; single women tired of waiting for the “right partner”; and women who don’t want to deal with two college tuitions or unruly teenagers in their sixties. What is the common thread? A desire for life on their own terms. They want children (I don’t doubt some desperately want children; especially the older women seeking expensive and sometimes painful fertility treatments), but within certain boundaries. That’s not to say there aren’t profound and intense emotions involved, and those emotions are certainly rationalized in innumerable ways, but selfishness is the heart of the matter. In fact, the very “fear” that many people feel is not the fear that they will harm their children through their own parental inadequacies but instead the fear that their children will harm them — by taking from them the life they’d always imagined. Self-indulgence is the common thread that runs through most culture war issues. From marriage to divorce to cohabitation to abortion, the desperate desire to satisfy the longings of our heart collides with a Judeo-Christian moral tradition that calls for children to be raised in faithful, married mother-father households. And so we make endless accommodations to our desires — protecting as a legal right the quest to satisfy every personal whim — and our culture cracks and crumbles. The paradox of the human condition is that those who seek to find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life will find it. In other words, the very act of self-denial enriches your life while selfishness destroys the soul. I like these words from Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore: “I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I woke and saw that life was duty. I acted, and behold, duty was joy.”
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COMMENTS 19
COLLAPSE 
| BMS
08/18/11 14:51 |
I don’t understand why people would want children in their 40’s and 50’s (even in their 30’s). It seem like it suddenly hit them that they have lived empty lives and want to make up for it. Since biology has limited their ability to have have children naturally they pump themselves full of hormones and then cry about how hard it is to get pregnant. True some people have fertility issues when they’re young, but it is rare. Instead of living a “me,me,me” existence they should have thought about that in their 20’s. My kids will both be out of the house when I’m in my mid-40’s. Who the hell wants to go to their kid’s high school graduation when they’re 70? |
 Dave
08/18/11 14:33 |
While I agree completely with this, the ultimate question remains this: what purpose can there be for self-denial in a life without God? Meaning, whatever many Americans profess as far as their belief in God and the afterlife, such thoughts are generally far from our minds. We may be the most religous people in the Western world, but ours is not an active, interventionist God, nor is the afterlife– in Heaven *OR* He-ll– a tangible consideration in our daily lives. Like it or not, the Western world in 2011 is a secular one with pockets of traditional Christianity here and there. And only rarely will you find those believers even remotely as committed as those you would find in 1500s France (let alone modern-day Saudi Arabia). This state of affairs has enabled great achievements, but it also allows for great ruin. If there are no consequences in the next life, then utilitarianism is the only answer in *this* life. After all, *why* practice self-denial for a salvation that never comes? Why fear sin when no damnation awaits? I’m not a religious man, not in the least. I do have tremendous respect for the faithful, even if I do not share that faith (and privately believe myself that such faith is misplaced energy). And while I do not believe that atheism is what causes our problems– for 500 years, the Western world asked religion questions it could not answer, so it is unsurprising that faith faltered– the stark reality remains: on a planet where humanity evolved (or was divinely created) with an imperative to believe in something greater than itself, what happens when what we believed in the longest no longer suffices? Humanity evolved with religious faith. It’s what we’ve always had: the carrot and the stick of our existence. Both of those are now, for all intents and purposes, absent from our lives– yet the *need* for those boundaries, those rules, those ethics & morals that define how best we hairless apes can best craft human society, that need still remains. Only now, there’s nothing to fill that need. Nothing but consumerist rot, trendy alien philosophies, the occasional dalliance in totalitarian fascism, or our own self-delusions. I don’t blame any of these women for doing wrong. With God absent from the modern world, who remains to teach them what’s right? |
| Widening Gyre
08/18/11 14:30 |
Well put, David French. Very well put. |
| NL
08/18/11 14:27 |
I really don’t think the problem is self-indulgence, convenience or entitlement. Those factors just make it harder to overlook the murder being committed. The slander of “selfishness” is often used by people who want you to feel bad when you do something they dislike. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with making choices that will improve your own happiness. It’s the basis for American government, as outlined in the Declaration. |
| The Livewire
08/18/11 14:36 |
So let me make sure I’m clear on this NL. You’d be fine with someone breaking into your house, stealing your stuff and shooting you, as long as the person was “making choices that will improve your own happiness.” |
| NL
08/18/11 14:42 |
I would be mad that they violated my rights by taking my stuff. I would not be mad that they were happy. The author is arguing that self-indulgence itself is the problem. I think abortion being murder is the problem. People ought to act to make themselves happy (which I expect will include a fair amount of altruism). But people shouldn’t act to make themselves at the expense of the rights of others. |
| Ronny
08/18/11 15:16 |
“There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with making choices that will improve your own happiness.” True in the most general sense, but also utterly useless because of that generality. Every moral choice results in concrete action (or inaction) that has real effects upon oneself and others in the world. As such, some choices *in re* are intrinsically wrong even if one thinks they may make one’s self happy. Moreover, the “happiness” of the Declaration is not necessarily the happiness of “selfishness.” You are conflating terms here that many people do not think should be conflated. Not everyone is a follower of Ayn Rand, and you will not get anything approaching consensus that this understanding of happiness serves as the basis for American government. |
| The Livewire
08/18/11 14:48 |
I misunderstood your post then. I’ll retract the sarcasm. |
| John B
08/18/11 14:11 |
As someone intimately familiar with big families of “Irish twins,” I must say that this is beyond my comprehension. My grandmother had 12 children a year to 18 months apart, loved her life and died at 85. My wife’s mother had five children, wanted more and would have loved a couple of sets of twins. A cousin of our generation had nine children, and never even worked up a sweat raising them. As adults, all became successful. My wife and I would have preferred a big family too but fertility problems limited our brood to two. All these mothers had husbands who worked hard, shared child care without the need of any ideological rationale and would never have even thought of separation or divorce. Really, which women “have it all?” |
| Jenna
08/18/11 14:07 |
I have trouble understanding why a woman who is so desperate to have a child that she endures years of fertility treatments – which are expensive and not all that pleasant – and is willing to become a mother well into her 40’s isn’t overjoyed when she finds out, after years of not being able to have even one child, that she’s going to have two. It makes we wonder if she wanted a child to share her life or a legacy to mark her existence. |
| LinUSA
08/18/11 14:32 |
I would think that such a woman would want both kids just in case something happened to the first. As long as we’re reducing other peoples’ human life to nothing more than markers in our own narcissistic existence, why not be rational about it? |
| Kit_in_Ohio
08/18/11 14:01 |
Well said, Mr. French. I have friends in their fifties struggling with exuberant eight year olds, and I myself am in a similar position. My friends and I know that parenthood comes on God’s terms, not our own. |
| CharlieCT
08/18/11 15:29 |
Well said, Kit. You take life as it comes. |
| Ronny
08/18/11 14:00 |
Well said, Mr. French. |
| denroy
08/18/11 13:59 |
Sounds like they have mental issues, to me. |
| cypher20
08/18/11 13:57 |
Mr. French, you have hit the nail on the head. While we can certainly sympathize with the dramatic emotions involved, unfortunately the core is self-indulgence/selfishness. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t approach people with love, though I admit it’s a struggle for me, but the truth remains. Well said sir. |
| Hardcastle
08/18/11 13:57 |
Lovely quotation — a keeper, to be shared with my children. |
| Gregory of Yardale
08/18/11 13:53 |
The real tragedy is that while these women abort viable children in service of their ideal of their perfect life, thousands of imperfect children await adoption. |
| L K S
08/18/11 13:46 |
a brilliant analysis – and poetic. |
ABYSSUS ABYSSUM INVOCAT / DEEP CALLS TO DEEP 