I can’t begin to describe the level of pain I feel when women go for IVF to create human lives and then, when they are successful, they abort.
I cannot and never will begin to understand how it is that a woman who wanted children badly enough to subject her body to IVF treatments, gets pregnant, and then goes for abortion.
This cri-de-couer is the result of this article in the Post:
A Toronto hospital’s refusal to reduce a woman’s twin pregnancy to one fetus — at least partly because of a doctor’s moral objections — has triggered a human-rights fight over the little-known but contentious procedure.The Ottawa-area patient had been warned that carrying twins at her age could increase the risk of losing the whole pregnancy, and was referred to Mount Sinai Hospital for a “selective reduction.” That means terminating at least one among multiple fetuses, akin to a partial abortion. But the institution declined to provide the service, saying its practice was to only reduce triplets or more, unless one of the twins has some kind of anomaly.
Doesn’t aborting a twin and leaving one just cause you to feel a punch in the gut? We are mostly pro-life readers at this blog, so of course we mourn every abortion. But honestly, as when babies are killed for the possibility of Down Syndrome, I just feel this all the more acutely.
Not so for the bioethicists on call here.
A woman should have the right to choose, just as she can opt for other procedures with debatable medical justification, like elective caesarian sections, said Francoise Baylis, Canada research chair in bioethics at Dalhousie University.
Doctors also have a right to conscientiously object to providing a service, but are obliged to refer patients to someone who will do it, she added.
There seems no justification for refusing twin reduction other than “disapproving of the (woman’s) decision,” said Udo Shuklenk, who holds the Ontario research chair in bioethics at Queen’s University.
I suppose there is hope in that Mt. Sinai didn’t want to do it.
Sunnybrook got ‘er done expediently though.
If this other twin survives, I hope he or she never finds out what happened.
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A person has to wonder whatever happened to fair and balanced journalism. The writer of the article gives space to only pro choice commentators. Although they did try to get comment from Mount Sinai Hospital, they should have known that the hospital would not be able to comment on a specific case, and should have given some space to, perhaps, a prolife bioethicist who would have provided some balance to the piece, or, at the least, tried to explain why a doctor would be ethically uncomfortable aborting one of a set of twins.
As for understanding the woman’s thought process, it does in a way “make sense” – her obstetrician scared the wits out of her by saying that if she kept both twins, she would be eight times more likely to miscarry. Harrowing choice at the end if a much-desired pregnancy that was probably very tough to achieve at 45 years of age (and unlikely to have been produced with her own eggs): miscarry both twins through inaction, or one through abortion. Yes, this 45-year old woman really wants to have a baby – so much so, that she is willing to take no chances, and that includes killing a child to increase eightfold the likelihood of survival of its twin.
The blame here does not go so much to this emotionally tangled mother, trying to ‘save’ at least one of her babies, but to the whole IVF industry and her doctors in particular. IVF is an unethical procedure that creates its own increased risks of miscarriage. Doctors often implant two embryos – especially when the woman is older, like this 45-year-old woman – to increase the odds of at least one implanting, and the expectation is there that abortion will solve the problem if more than one embryo implants. Were these twins identical or did the doctors implant two embryos, with the calm knowledge that one would be aborted later if both implanted? The woman may not even have been briefed about this expectation…or perhaps she was, and went along with it because after all, human life is expendable these days and unborn children are just raw material rather than real human beings, apparently. She and her doctors are the Gods of life and death, just because they can be.
What will this woman tell her surviving child? That by aborting its twin she “saved” his or her life, and that the child is lucky to be alive. The poor child will grow up half-believing that, and yet probably dealing with ‘survivor guilt’, a hidden hole in its heart where it longs for the brother or sister that it should have, and a strange distrust of its mother who is both a savior and a murderer. Children conceived from reproductive technologies are familiar with this pain.