My rule of thumb is that I do not
expect publications to take a pro-life position. I ask only
that their accounts give the reader a sense of what is given
up when babies are aborted.
I just finished reading "When
Fertility Treatments Become Frightening," a riveting article
that runs in the April issue of Self magazine. [You
can read it online at
www.self.com/health/2009/04/multifetal-reduction]
Written by Roxanne Patel
Shepelavy, the story examines what is euphemistically
described as "multifetal reduction." In English that means
when a woman is carrying a number of babies (almost always
as a result of efforts to overcome infertility), she
"selectively" aborts some of the babies.
Shepelavy examines the issues
that surround whether or not to "reduce" the number of these
babies by using a pro-life woman ("Kristina") who grapples
successfully with the initial news that she is carrying
three babies but ultimately (and with enormous anguish)
decides that six is too many. We learn all the medical and
familial justifications that are used at the same time we
are told that multifetal reduction developed hand in hand in
the mid-1980s with in vitro fertilization and intrauterine
insemination (more commonly called artificial insemination).
But as Shepelavy writes, "Still,
there are women whose remorse after reduction is not easily
forgotten." Kristina's situation, in particular, just tears
the reader apart.
Kristina waits until the last
possible moment before going to her physician's office,
"hop[ing] that one or more of the hearts would have stopped
on their own." We read about how the babies will be killed.
The doctor fills a three-inch-long needle "with
potassium chloride, a clear metal chemical that stops the
heart when inserted directly into it."
Using an ultrasound monitor as a guide he finds the first
baby he is going to abort. A scene already straight out of
Dante quickly becomes worse.
But as he touched the needle to her skin, she suddenly
started sobbing. Her uterus tightened, preventing the needle
from going through. "I was freaking out, still questioning
if we should do it," she recalls. "It's not that it hurt so
much. I was just at my wit's end by that point." After a few
minutes, Kristina calmed down enough for the doctor to
insert the needle. He pushed it all the way into the first
baby's heart, then injected the potassium chloride, a
process that took only a few seconds. By the time he'd
removed the needle, Kristina was sobbing again. And again
her uterus became so tense he wasn't able to continue. As
she tried to relax, the technician put the ultrasound paddle
over the first baby, expecting to see its heart had stopped.
But it hadn't. Somehow, the fetus had survived the
injection, a rare anomaly. Michael, who was facing the
monitor, gasped. For Kristina, the news was too much. She
leaped off the table, inconsolable.
"Stop!"
she shouted, in hysterics. "I can't do this! It's not meant
to be."
But the
next day Kristina returns. The "procedure" takes only 20
minutes. "When the technician checked, all three hearts had
stopped."
If this
weren't awful enough, there is the realistic chance she will
spontaneously miscarry her three remaining babies. She does
not.
Over the
past 10 or 15 years I have read a lot of stories about
"selectively" aborting unborn babies. This account--sad and
emotionally draining as it is-- is very much worth reading.
