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NRL News
The Growing
Antipathy To The Less-Than-Perfect
“I asked
[Mark] Evans if what he had just done was an abortion. ‘Technically,
this is not an abortion, a procedure that kills the fetus and
empties the uterus,’ he said. ‘The bottom line is, abortion ends the
pregnancy. We don’t end the pregnancy. We very specifically don’t
end the pregnancy. … Twenty years ago, the ethical debate was with
triplets, [Evans told reporter Liza Mundy.] “But now, as far as I’m
concerned, there is no doubt about triplets, and the ethical debate
has moved to twins.”
“My wife and I
just had an abortion. Two, actually. We walked into a doctor’s
office in downtown Los Angeles with four thriving fetuses—two girls
and two boys—and walked out an hour later with just the girls, whom
we will name, if we’re lucky enough to keep them, Rosalind and
Vivian. Rosalind is my mother’s name.”
“Thousands of
ethicists and bioethicists, as they are called, professionally guide
the unthinkable on its passage through the debatable on its way to
becoming the justifiable, until it is finally established as the
unexceptional.” Every once in a while, there comes a barrage of stories on a particular stomach-turning “procedure” that alerts us in unmistakable terms to another outgrowth of the hydra-headed anti-life ethos. That is what happened for me last month, most particularly in an op-ed that ran in the Los Angeles Times and an excerpt from a new book, Everything Conceivable: How Assisted Reproduction Is Changing Men, Women, and the World, that appeared in the Washington Post. Together, these and a flock of other stories brought home unmistakably the growth of “respectable eugenics,” the mentality that undergirds prenatal screening and “selective reduction”—the cold-as-steel “procedure” by which one or more unborn babies are poisoned. I’ve written a daily blog called “Today’s News & Views” since 2000. Never has the response been more passionate, angry, and outraged than to my comments about Dan Neil’s sickening op-ed. We’re told that on their third try at in vitro fertilization, Neil and his wife, Tina, have success. Four of the five embryos that were implanted “set up residence” (in Neil’s words). “Beforehand, the fertility specialist asked us if we were OK with ‘reduction’—also known as selective abortion—in the event that too many took hold,” Neil writes. “We said yes, not really appreciating what that meant.” They give the two girls names—Rosalind and Vivian—but abort the two boys, who went without names, at 15 weeks. The moral calculation (so to speak) that went into the decision to abort the boys over the girls drew special ire from our readers. A key seems to be, as Neil wrote,that “Some studies show offspring of older fathers (I’m 47) run a higher risk of autism, and males are four times as likely to be autistic.” This antipathy to the less-than-perfect was an ongoing part of the larger story. You need a little background to understand this fully. Neil suggests that the decision to abort two of the children was concern over the heightened risk to his wife of carrying multiple babies. They know there are four babies as early as four weeks, “but our doctor told us to wait to see if the number would reduce on its own, as often happens.” Next thing you know the babies are 12 weeks old and genetic tests are taken, “reasoning that if we had to abort two, it would be better to abort any fetuses with genetic abnormalities.” It takes two more weeks to get the results back “and by that time Tina was experiencing complications so severe that we had to put her in the hospital.” Even though the “whole time, an awful clock was ticking,” they hold off to make sure they abort the “right” kids (any who might have disabilities). Evidently none show up, so they are reduced to aborting the boys because, with an older father, one of the children might have autism and boys are more likely (according to “some studies”) to have autism. Space permits only a few paragraphs on the Mundy excerpt from her new book that appeared in the Post. Not so long ago the rationale for aborting some of the babies of a multi-fetal pregnancy extended only to cases where there were at least three or four growing babies. That day has come and gone. Mark Evans tells Mundy, if you accept that you can “reduce” one baby to none (a conventional abortion), why would you object to reducing twins to singlets? And if having one boy and one girl is absolutely essential, it’s no surprise that inexorably the justification has now reached to aborting females if the family already has a girl. The excerpt, to its credit, does not avoid the obvious realities. One second, vibrant babies are all but e-mailing the sonographer that they are alive and well. “Then [Evans] pinned C with the needle, and pushed the plunger to release the chemical. The fetus, which had been undulating and waving, went still.” But the pool of eligible victims is not limited to babies unfortunate enough to be sharing a room with a number of siblings. It was enlarged enormously by the decision earlier this year by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) to recommend that all pregnant women be routinely tested to see if their unborn babies have the extra chromosome that causes Down syndrome. Previously ACOG recommended routine screening only for women 35 and older. The justification for the lethal expansion was ostensibly a change in technology making testing “safer.” But with 9 in 10 babies found to be carrying the extra chromosome aborted, the lethal implications of ACOG’s recommendation smack you right in the face. And only a fool would think that the insistence on flawless babies would end with babies bearing serious anomalies. A story last month in a British newspaper told readers, “Doctors have been given permission to create a baby free from a genetic disorder which would have caused the child to have a severe squint.” Neil ended his piece by expressing his gratitude to the “physician who performed our reduction.” More than that, “When Roz and Viv grow up, I hope one day I can introduce them to her. I think she’d be proud.” Many, many years ago I attended a workshop that addressed the effect of abortion on surviving siblings. It remains to this day one of the most powerful messages I have ever heard and one of the least researched. Kids often know, even when not told, that something awful has happened. Their responses are never good, ranging from a desperate attempt not to anger the parents to despondency over surviving—and everything in between. Maybe the abortionist will “be proud” when she sees “Roz and Viv.” I doubt seriously that will be their response to the woman who took their brothers’ lives. |