Makes it sound a little like price cuts at Walmart.
Instead, it’s yet more signs that the death culture is alive and kicking:
Like so many other couples these days, the Toronto-area business executive and her husband put off having children for years as they built successful careers. Both parents were in their 40s — and their first son just over a year old — when this spring the woman became pregnant a second time. Seven weeks in, an ultrasound revealed the Burlington, Ont., resident was carrying twins. “It came as a complete shock,” said the mother, who asked not to be named. “We’re both career people. If we were going to have three children two years apart, someone else was going to be raising our kids. … All of a sudden our lives as we know them and as we like to lead them, are not going to happen.”
She soon discovered another option: Doctors could “reduce” the pregnancy from twins to a singleton through a little-known procedure that eliminates selected fetuses — and has become increasingly common in the past two decades amid a boom in the number of multiple pregnancies.
Selective reductions are typically carried out for women pregnant with triplets or greater, where the risk of harm or death climbs sharply with each additional fetus. The Ontario couple is part of what some experts say is a growing demand for reducing twins to one, fuelled more by socio-economic imperatives than medical need, and raising vexing new ethical questions.
It’s hard for me to fathom a society that would embrace this sort of thing. It’s a new low and we’d already sank to new depths.
Seriously sick and twisted stuff.
UPDATE: I’m wrong. It’s not a new low. I’m simply oblivious. Alicia Colon covered this sort of thing back in ’04:
The idea of moving out to Staten Island was so abhorrent to Amy Richards that she did what many mothers would find detestable. Here’s more from Amy: “When we saw the specialist, we found out that I was carrying identical twins and a stand alone. My doctors thought the stand alone was three days older. There was something psychologically comforting about that, since I wanted to have just one. Before the procedure, I was focused on relaxing. But Peter was staring at the sonogram screen thinking: Oh, my gosh, there are three heartbeats. I can’t believe we’re about to make two disappear.”
Disappearing heartbeats are of no concern to smart modern women like Ms. Richards and she certainly has plenty of company. Lindsay Beyerstein has a master’s degree from Tufts and on her blog site writes that Amy Richards is a role model. She is puzzled by the outrage of Ms. Richards’s selective abortion. On her Web site she writes: “Many women don’t realize that selective reduction is an option. Thanks to Richards, some women who would otherwise have terminated their entire pregnancies may choose to carry their preferred number of fetuses to term. For that, both pro-choice and pro-life activists should salute her.”
Ah, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, you were so right when you warned of that slippery slope of defining deviancy down.
Read it all and wonder at the evil and how easily some can justify it.
