So in the abortion debate, we have mostly been talking about women with unplanned pregnancies. But what about those women who intentionally got pregnant, but still get an abortion?
Take for example when the mother finds out she has TWINS. In a growing number of cases now, women are saying to themselves "I didn't sign up for this!"
So she aborts one them.
One anonymous woman wrote on yahoo answers:
The Two-Minus-One Pregnancy
The New York Times, August 10, 2011
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.
“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.”
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. We still have to work out just how far we’re willing to go to construct the lives we want.
Jenny’s decision to reduce twins to a single fetus was never really in doubt. The idea of managing two infants at this point in her life terrified her. She and her husband already had grade-school-age children, and she took pride in being a good mother. She felt that twins would soak up everything she had to give, leaving nothing for her older children. Even the twins would be robbed, because, at best, she could give each one only half of her attention and, she feared, only half of her love. Jenny desperately wanted another child, but not at the risk of becoming a second-rate parent. “This is bad, but it’s not anywhere as bad as neglecting your child or not giving everything you can to the children you have,” she told me, referring to the reduction. She and her husband worked out this moral calculation on their own, and they intend to never tell anyone about it. Jenny is certain that no one, not even her closest friends, would understand, and she doesn’t want to be the object of their curiosity or feel the sting of their judgment.
This secrecy is common among women undergoing reduction to a singleton. Doctors who perform the procedure, aware of the stigma, tell patients to be cautious about revealing their decision. (All but one of the patients I spoke with insisted on anonymity.) Some patients are so afraid of being treated with disdain that they withhold this information from the obstetrician who will deliver their child.
What is it about terminating half a twin pregnancy that seems more controversial than reducing triplets to twins or aborting a single fetus? After all, the math’s the same either way: one fewer fetus. Perhaps it’s because twin reduction (unlike abortion) involves selecting one fetus over another, when either one is equally wanted. Perhaps it’s our culture’s idealized notion of twins as lifelong soul mates, two halves of one whole.
I wonder, how on earth are these women ever going to explain what they did, to the other twin, their child that they chose to keep?
Claire Culwell was living what she thought was a normal teenage life in the home of her adopted Christian parents when she decided that the time had come to connect with her birth mother. What Claire discovered from her biological mother rocked her world, changing her life forever. Claire's biological mother had been forced to abort at the age of 13, after five months of pregnancy. As a little fetus in the womb, Claire inexplicably survived the surgical abortion, but her twin sister did not. A few weeks later, her mother was brought back to the same abortion clinic to have the botched job finished, but the doctor refused to perform what would now be classified as a late-term abortion. Claire was born two weeks after the scheduled abortion, weighing a mere three pounds.
After the shocking revelation, Claire understood why so many health issues had constantly plagued her. She heard how the attempt on her life through abortion had left its mark on her, dislocating her hips, giving her club feet, and inflicting other injuries on her, injuries which still manifest themselves to this day.
There's a video interview about this on YouTube, type in "Claire Culwell".
It seems like these days, women want to pick and choose exactly when and how many children they want to have.
And any inconvenient children that start growing inside them at the wrong time, they just abort.
I have heard women say things like, "I want children, just not now. Maybe in 5 years..."
or even "I don't need another boy, we already have 3 of them", implying that if it had happened to be a girl, the mother might have kept it.
I think most people recognize that it is not okay to abort a pregnancy just because you were hoping for a different gender, though it can be difficult to prevent this.
But maybe as abortion becomes ever more trivialized, this will be seen as just yet another choice for the woman to make, what gender baby she wants.
Once the woman is given the "choice", there is not really any way to make sure she will not abuse this choice. I think most people, however, recognize that abortion is a serious thing and is not appropriate for just any whimsical reason.
With the "two minus one" abortion, it obviously makes one question whether the woman really needed to abort one if she is keeping the other. And it also leaves us to wonder how far some of these women are actually taking their "choice". It's not as easy to have empathy for these women's decisions, not unless you assume the fetus has absolutely no value whatsoever.
Take for example when the mother finds out she has TWINS. In a growing number of cases now, women are saying to themselves "I didn't sign up for this!"
So she aborts one them.
One anonymous woman wrote on yahoo answers:
The Two-Minus-One Pregnancy
The New York Times, August 10, 2011
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.
“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.”
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. We still have to work out just how far we’re willing to go to construct the lives we want.
Jenny’s decision to reduce twins to a single fetus was never really in doubt. The idea of managing two infants at this point in her life terrified her. She and her husband already had grade-school-age children, and she took pride in being a good mother. She felt that twins would soak up everything she had to give, leaving nothing for her older children. Even the twins would be robbed, because, at best, she could give each one only half of her attention and, she feared, only half of her love. Jenny desperately wanted another child, but not at the risk of becoming a second-rate parent. “This is bad, but it’s not anywhere as bad as neglecting your child or not giving everything you can to the children you have,” she told me, referring to the reduction. She and her husband worked out this moral calculation on their own, and they intend to never tell anyone about it. Jenny is certain that no one, not even her closest friends, would understand, and she doesn’t want to be the object of their curiosity or feel the sting of their judgment.
This secrecy is common among women undergoing reduction to a singleton. Doctors who perform the procedure, aware of the stigma, tell patients to be cautious about revealing their decision. (All but one of the patients I spoke with insisted on anonymity.) Some patients are so afraid of being treated with disdain that they withhold this information from the obstetrician who will deliver their child.
What is it about terminating half a twin pregnancy that seems more controversial than reducing triplets to twins or aborting a single fetus? After all, the math’s the same either way: one fewer fetus. Perhaps it’s because twin reduction (unlike abortion) involves selecting one fetus over another, when either one is equally wanted. Perhaps it’s our culture’s idealized notion of twins as lifelong soul mates, two halves of one whole.
I wonder, how on earth are these women ever going to explain what they did, to the other twin, their child that they chose to keep?
Claire Culwell was living what she thought was a normal teenage life in the home of her adopted Christian parents when she decided that the time had come to connect with her birth mother. What Claire discovered from her biological mother rocked her world, changing her life forever. Claire's biological mother had been forced to abort at the age of 13, after five months of pregnancy. As a little fetus in the womb, Claire inexplicably survived the surgical abortion, but her twin sister did not. A few weeks later, her mother was brought back to the same abortion clinic to have the botched job finished, but the doctor refused to perform what would now be classified as a late-term abortion. Claire was born two weeks after the scheduled abortion, weighing a mere three pounds.
After the shocking revelation, Claire understood why so many health issues had constantly plagued her. She heard how the attempt on her life through abortion had left its mark on her, dislocating her hips, giving her club feet, and inflicting other injuries on her, injuries which still manifest themselves to this day.
There's a video interview about this on YouTube, type in "Claire Culwell".
It seems like these days, women want to pick and choose exactly when and how many children they want to have.
And any inconvenient children that start growing inside them at the wrong time, they just abort.
I have heard women say things like, "I want children, just not now. Maybe in 5 years..."
or even "I don't need another boy, we already have 3 of them", implying that if it had happened to be a girl, the mother might have kept it.
I think most people recognize that it is not okay to abort a pregnancy just because you were hoping for a different gender, though it can be difficult to prevent this.
But maybe as abortion becomes ever more trivialized, this will be seen as just yet another choice for the woman to make, what gender baby she wants.
Once the woman is given the "choice", there is not really any way to make sure she will not abuse this choice. I think most people, however, recognize that abortion is a serious thing and is not appropriate for just any whimsical reason.
With the "two minus one" abortion, it obviously makes one question whether the woman really needed to abort one if she is keeping the other. And it also leaves us to wonder how far some of these women are actually taking their "choice". It's not as easy to have empathy for these women's decisions, not unless you assume the fetus has absolutely no value whatsoever.
