“Reducing” Twins to One Child In Utero

It is called selective abortion and has been practiced, supposedly for medical reasons, to “protect” some babies when there are too many in the mother’s womb. Multiple births have become much more common with IVF and fertility drugs resulting in more women carrying three or more children. Because of apprehension about the ability of all the babies to survive due to lack of space in the womb, selective abortion for those women who choose it is done by injecting potassium chloride into the hearts of some of the babies to “reduce”their number.

In an extensive article appearing in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, Ruth Padawer states: “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.”

In other words, what started as a means to curb the birth of triplets, quads, etc., has now become an increasingly-used option to reduce twins to a single birth. According to Padawer, Dr. Richard Berkowitz insists that there is no clear medical benefit to reducing below twins but he will do it if a patient requests it. “In a society where women can terminate a single pregnancy for any reason — financial, social, emotional — if we have a way to reduce a twin pregnancy with very little risk, isn’t it legitimate to offer that service to women with twins who want to reduce to a singleton?”

We, of course, find it abhorrent to inject any baby with a lethal substance with the clear intent to kill the child. But, notice, that in the never-ending quest to legitimize any abortion request, it is now becoming “acceptable” to exercise a “choice” to ensure that you only have one child at a time. Here’s the million dollar question: if you are a mother who has killed one of her twins, what, if anything, does she tell the surviving child? It is too awful to complicate.

Read the New York Times Sunday Magazine article here.

Barbara Lyons