The August 10, 2011 edition of New York Times Magazine featured a column titled, The Two Minus One Pregnancy. I read the article with clenched teeth, an extraordinary sense of incredulity and rising blood pressure. The article focused on how women carrying twins “reduce” the number of unborn babies they carry from two to one.
The procedure, which is usually performed [starting at] around Week 12 of a pregnancy, involves a fatal injection of potassium chloride into the fetal chest. The dead fetus shrivels over time and remains in the womb until delivery.
Barbarous. (Where is the ACLU on this?)
More maddening is that the justification given by almost all of the couples is one of lifestyle choice. These abortions are performed on perfectly healthy babies, and the pregnancies are almost always planned. Even abortion advocates are finding great difficulty in using their idiotic and disingenuous rationalizations to defend these abortions.
The abortionist who was a pioneer of the “reduction” technique initially argued against using the procedure to reduce twins to a “singleton.” By 2004 he had very publicly changed his mind and is now a “singleton” advocate because of stories like Jenny’s.
Jenny desperately wanted another child, but not at the risk of becoming a second-rate parent. 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 took pride in being a good mother. She felt that twins would soak up everything she had to give. 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 took pride in being a good mother?!?! She is walking around with a child she had poisoned shriveling up next to its maturing sibling!
Several beta-blockers and a few days later I thought it was safe to venture back into the cyber bowels of the out-of touch-media. Not so. A Frances Kissling column defending “reductions” in Saturday’s “On Faith” section of The Washington Post managed to yet again cause my arterial pressure to rise.
For those who may not know Frances, she’s a basic run-of-the-mill pro-abortion hag. She was a nun for about 12 minutes back in the 1960s, ran an abortion clinic in New York in the 1970s, then hooked-up (to use the vernacular of the day) with Catholics for Choice in the 1980s and served as that organization’s president for 25 bloody years. She now works as a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania.
Ms. Kissling has spent the better part of her adult life promoting, profiting and advocating for abortion on demand, for any reason, during the entire pregnancy – yes, all nine months. She has been perverting and corrupting her proclaimed faith even longer. Therefore it came as no surprise that she would again debase scripture to further substantiate her extreme abortion worldview by titling her commentary, Be Fruitful and Subtract.
In the rambling apologetic, Frances asks the painfully obvious rhetorical question:
“After all, if it is moral to decide for the abortion of one fetus or many for whatever reason a woman considers adequate, then why are we troubled, if we are, by deciding to end the life of one of two fetuses?”
Seriously, I agree. The pro-abortion industry and lobby have lauded the poisoning, curetting, and butchering of nearly 40 million babies, why be squeamish about killing one, leaving one. And rhetorical as it may have been, Frances feebly attempted to answer her own question by stating that oft-repeated pro-abortion cluck:
“The most urgent ethical questions we face are not about abortion. They are about our personal and social responsibility to bring children into the world that have a chance to lead a meaningful life, reasonably free of suffering.”
Reasonably free of suffering?
A quick search of the Internet reveals an abundance of resources for “twin-less twins.” Site after site, and webpage upon webpage discuss the many psychological and emotional ramifications of multiple-pregnancy survivors. There are also many other resources dealing with physical dangers to the surviving twin. The effects are categorized under Vanishing Twin Syndrome.
In 1979 William Styron introduced the world to the fictional character Sophie Zawistowski, who in Sophie’s Choice has to decide which of her children to have gassed at Auschwitz. During the course of over 500 pages, Mr. Styron leaves no doubt as to how the monstrous choice destroyed Sophie’s life and by inference how it would destroy most any other parent’s life.
Yet a former nun who has contorted her self-proclaimed faith and God’s word emphatically declares that she finds nothing morally, or ethically challenging with a mother culling her unborn children.
God have mercy on her. God have mercy on us.
LifeNews.com Note: Raimundo Rojas is the long-time director of Hispanic outreach for the National Right to Life Committee. He is a former president of Florida Right to Life and has presented the pro-life message to millions in Spanish-language media outlets.
