New York Times Touts “Selective Reduction” as a “Half Abortion”

Opinion   |   Steven Ertelt   |   Aug 10, 2011   |   11:41AM   |   Washington, DC

As if the new York Times couldn’t sink any further down the hole of warped and twisted pro-abortion activism, the Gray Lady is out with yet another “news” piece that moves the newspaper further beyond the pale.

Ruth Pawder is out today with a new story titled “The Two-Minus-One Pregnancy,” that focuses on “selective reduction” – the euphemistic phrase given to name the destruction of one or more unborn children in a multiple pregnancy situation where a mother has more than one baby resulting from an IVF pregnancy involving the implantation of multiple human embryos.

The Times never makes it past the second paragraph before showing how “Jenny,” an IVF client, justifies the abortion of one of her twin babies because she didn’t conceive naturally. Jenny’s remarks to the Times are ghastly:

“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 it’s Pawder’s description of Jenny’s actions to extinguish the live of one of her healthy babies that takes the cake for its offensiveness.

“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,” Pawder writes.

The comment was shocking even to Wendy Wright, the former president of Concerned Women for America, who has been involved in the abortion debate for decades.

“This tragic outcome would have been foreseeable when ‘choice’ became the ultimate god,” she told LifeNews in response. “Yet I doubt that anyone conceived of something so horrible, that people would deliberately conceive children then deliberately abort them simply because they are children. Morality does not change with technology; the intensity of one’s moral decisions increase when beginning with the belief that ‘you can be like God.'”

Wright says the Times article “pulls back the curtain to reveal that women and doctors are choosing who to kill like a sniper decides who to shoot, based on short-term thinking, personal benefits and which victim is accessible. It begs us to question: when will hurting someone’s feelings by saying this is wrong become less important than valuing human life? Perhaps not until it is our own life at stake.”

But, for Pawder and the Times, “selective reduction” is not a big deal — because it’s just a little math.

“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,” Pawder writes.

That’s the kind of eugenic attitude that the pro-life movement must overcome.