Twin Reduction Abortion

[jimmy olsen]

Nauseatingly horrible.

There are a couple dozen links scattered throughout this article. Click here if you want to investigate them.
http://www.slate.com/id/2301322/

Half Aborted
Why do "reductions" of twin pregnancies trouble pro-choicers?
By William SaletanPosted Tuesday, Aug. 16, 2011, at 9:12 AM ET

What'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.
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Across the pro-choice blogosphere, including Slate, the article has provoked discomfort. RH Reality Check, a Web site 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 forego 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 is deliberately being spared. Why, then, does reduction unsettle so many pro-choicers?

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.

[Syt]

Too late for Ed.

[Viking]

There is nothing moral about a coin toss.

[Ideologue]

...the fuck is the difference between this and normal abortion?

If you planned one kid, why would you want two?

[Martinus]

Not sure what the problem is, unless you believe in the new age claptrap that there is a spiritual link between twins, and the aborted one will come back to haunt the one born alive. 

[Martinus]

...the fuck is the difference between this and normal abortion?

If you planned one kid, why would you want two?

Yeah. Sounds like a better thing than just aborting both twins and waiting for a single next time.

[Valmy]

Yeah I do not really follow how this is different at all from a normal abortion.

[DGuller]

It humanizes the aborted one, read the article.

[Martinus]

Yeah I do not really follow how this is different at all from a normal abortion.

I think some anti-choicers operate (whether because of deliberate intellectual dishonesty or simply because they are stupid) under a false assumption that pro-choicers consider abortion to be something good or at least morally neutral.

Abortion is definitely a morally non-neutral procedure, and one that should not be taken lightly - a decision to abort is an evil. It's just that letting a woman make this choice herself, rather than being forced to do it (one way or the other - including being pressured to have an abortion by her culture or government) is the lesser of two evils.

From that perspective, if you had a good reason to abort a singular fetus for reasons XYZ, there is no moral difference in aborting one of two fetuses for reasons XYZ. I guess if people were aborting one of the twins for frivolous reasons then it would be wrong - but then it would be wrong to abort a single fetus for those reasons too.

[Malthus]

Sounds like something the author of the article *hopes* will trouble pro-choicers.

[Martinus]

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,"

And that's just retarded. Killing a fetus (outside of a consensual abortion procedure) should carry a penalty, but equating it with a proper murder is simply wrong.

[Ideologue]

It humanizes the aborted one, read the article.

I guess, if you want to interpret it that way.

Doesn't apply to fraternal twins, but the great thing is that at that early a stage, identical twins truly are nearly identical.  You're not even destroying a great deal of unique information.

[stjaba]

...the fuck is the difference between this and normal abortion?

If you planned one kid, why would you want two?

Yeah. Sounds like a better thing than just aborting both twins and waiting for a single next time.

I think the difference is that people are understanding of the choice to have an abortion when the pregnancy itself is unexpected; when the child will be disabled; the mother's life is at risk, etc. It's basically the "lesser of two evils" as you mentioned in another post.

I think you would have a stronger point if selective reductions were occurring in regular pregnancies. But I think many of these are occurring when the mother has undergone IVF. What makes this more disturbing than a "regular abortion" is that in a selective reduction the choice is almost purely financial/hassle avoidance based. In many/most cases, the mother has chosen to be pregnant, often even undertaking fertility treatments, as explained in the NY Times article. It just "seems" sick to implant an embryo in a mother, let it grow, and then kill it off because it will be a financial hassle later on.

The quote from the NY Times in particular that even pro-choicers have trouble with is the following:

"Things would have been different if we were 15 years younger or if we hadn't had children already or if we were more financially secure," she said later. "If I had conceived these twins naturally, I wouldn't have reduced this pregnancy, because you feel like if there's a natural order, then you don't want to disturb it. But we created this child in such an artificial manner — in a test tube, choosing an egg donor, having the embryo placed in me — and somehow, making a decision about how many to carry seemed to be just another choice. The pregnancy was all so consumerish to begin with, and this became yet another thing we could control."

[Ideologue]

Isn't "financial hassle" the principal reason to abort?

[stjaba]

Isn't "financial hassle" the principal reason to abort?

Who knows? Anyways, of the various to get an abortion, it's probably the least justifiable.

Also, it is hard to believe that someone who could afford elective IVF treatments cannot really afford a child. The financial hassle justification is easier to swallow when someone is a college student, barely making ends meet, etc.