Makes it sound a little like price cuts at Walmart.
Instead, it's yet more signs that the death culture is alive and kicking:
Like so many other couples these days, the Toronto-area business executive and her husband put off having children for years as they built successful careers. Both parents were in their 40s -- and their first son just over a year old -- when this spring the woman became pregnant a second time. Seven weeks in, an ultrasound revealed the Burlington, Ont., resident was carrying twins. "It came as a complete shock," said the mother, who asked not to be named. "We're both career people. If we were going to have three children two years apart, someone else was going to be raising our kids. ... All of a sudden our lives as we know them and as we like to lead them, are not going to happen."
She soon discovered another option: Doctors could "reduce" the pregnancy from twins to a singleton through a little-known procedure that eliminates selected fetuses -- and has become increasingly common in the past two decades amid a boom in the number of multiple pregnancies.
Selective reductions are typically carried out for women pregnant with triplets or greater, where the risk of harm or death climbs sharply with each additional fetus. The Ontario couple is part of what some experts say is a growing demand for reducing twins to one, fuelled more by socio-economic imperatives than medical need, and raising vexing new ethical questions.
It's hard for me to fathom a society that would embrace this sort of thing. It's a new low and we'd already sank to new depths.
Seriously sick and twisted stuff.
UPDATE: I'm wrong. It's not a new low. I'm simply oblivious. Alicia Colon covered this sort of thing back in '04:
The idea of moving out to Staten Island was so abhorrent to Amy Richards that she did what many mothers would find detestable. Here's more from Amy: "When we saw the specialist, we found out that I was carrying identical twins and a stand alone. My doctors thought the stand alone was three days older. There was something psychologically comforting about that, since I wanted to have just one. Before the procedure, I was focused on relaxing. But Peter was staring at the sonogram screen thinking: Oh, my gosh, there are three heartbeats. I can't believe we're about to make two disappear."
Disappearing heartbeats are of no concern to smart modern women like Ms. Richards and she certainly has plenty of company. Lindsay Beyerstein has a master's degree from Tufts and on her blog site writes that Amy Richards is a role model. She is puzzled by the outrage of Ms. Richards's selective abortion. On her Web site she writes: "Many women don't realize that selective reduction is an option. Thanks to Richards, some women who would otherwise have terminated their entire pregnancies may choose to carry their preferred number of fetuses to term. For that, both pro-choice and pro-life activists should salute her."
Ah, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, you were so right when you warned of that slippery slope of defining deviancy down.
Read it all and wonder at the evil and how easily some can justify it.
Comments (14)
On a related note, Death Ro... (Below threshold)1. Posted by GarandFan | February 4, 2011 9:58 PM | Score: 10 (12 votes cast)
On a related note, Death Row inmates in Kalifornia are suing the FDA for allowing importation of the main drug (no longer made in the US - go figure) used in executions.
Maybe we should just refer to executions as "selective reductions". The libs appear to be okay with that.
1. Posted by GarandFan | February 4, 2011 9:58 PM |
Score: 10 (12 votes cast)
Posted on February 4, 2011 21:58
2. Posted by sarahconnor2 | February 4, 2011 10:20 PM | Score: 8 (8 votes cast)
Somebody should fill that couple in on the fact that parenthood is not neat and orderly.
2. Posted by sarahconnor2 | February 4, 2011 10:20 PM |
Score: 8 (8 votes cast)
Posted on February 4, 2011 22:20
3. Posted by 914 | February 4, 2011 11:05 PM | Score: 4 (4 votes cast)
So having a child is equated to breast reduction or a tummy tuck.
I thank God I did not have unfeeling ghouls like that for Parents.
3. Posted by 914 | February 4, 2011 11:05 PM |
Score: 4 (4 votes cast)
Posted on February 4, 2011 23:05
4. Posted by epador | February 4, 2011 11:15 PM | Score: 4 (4 votes cast)
How selfish of Mom, and to think the twin who survives, likely always feeling something is missing... God forbid they find out!
4. Posted by epador | February 4, 2011 11:15 PM |
Score: 4 (4 votes cast)
Posted on February 4, 2011 23:15
5. Posted by gaius piconius | February 5, 2011 12:16 AM | Score: 3 (5 votes cast)
This is my bailiwick..the good old sharing and caring Canada...the mum's a butcher, the dad's a butcher, (the last sentence allowing these inferrences), and the doctor, he sleeps well at night! Yet they'll likely give to Haiti, fret on the useless waste of soldier's lives in overseas endeavours, decry the northern ranchers' culling of wolf packs and might even be vegans for the same set of noble sensibilities...yet a tiny, still invisible living gift from the previous eternity, (the one that is interrupted at conception), can be secretly consigned to the last eternity because of a convenience factor, and the condoning of it by liberal social mores.
The latin for 'left' is what!... 'sinister'...how archly apropos.
5. Posted by gaius piconius | February 5, 2011 12:16 AM |
Score: 3 (5 votes cast)
Posted on February 5, 2011 00:16
6. Posted by Jim Addison | February 5, 2011 12:44 AM | Score: 2 (4 votes cast)
It is horrific and appalling, but how is it a "new low" for society? It would be perfectly lawful in this country for both twins to be killed, and who knows how often that is the case?
The day the law decided there was some "right" to take a 14 year old girl across state lines, without her parents' knowledge or consent and against the laws of the state in which she lives, to get an abortion, we pretty much hit the "low" point of societal evolution.
6. Posted by Jim Addison | February 5, 2011 12:44 AM |
Score: 2 (4 votes cast)
Posted on February 5, 2011 00:44
7. Posted by Don L | February 5, 2011 7:17 AM | Score: 1 (3 votes cast)
Once you call a 100% living human - regardless of the stage of life - a choice, a thing, once you reduce human life, through biodiversity, to the level of a rat, it is the beginning of the end.
Since innocent life is now expendable for convenience, nothing can stop the government from deciding who is convenient and who isn't.
Nice job Satan!
7. Posted by Don L | February 5, 2011 7:17 AM |
Score: 1 (3 votes cast)
Posted on February 5, 2011 07:17
8. Posted by DaveD | February 5, 2011 7:40 AM | Score: 3 (3 votes cast)
At least their first son will be loved because he didn't change his parents' lives from the way they like to lead them.
8. Posted by DaveD | February 5, 2011 7:40 AM |
Score: 3 (3 votes cast)
Posted on February 5, 2011 07:40
9. Posted by Olsoljer | February 5, 2011 8:17 AM | Score: 5 (5 votes cast)
Sooner or later someone will remember and tell the surviving twin - then mommy and daddy will have to explain it to him - Somehow I don't think that will go over real well
9. Posted by Olsoljer | February 5, 2011 8:17 AM |
Score: 5 (5 votes cast)
Posted on February 5, 2011 08:17
10. Posted by Marie | February 5, 2011 9:24 AM | Score: 3 (3 votes cast)
Nothing surprises me any more. We find new and improved ways to hit rock bottom each and every day in this country.
10. Posted by Marie | February 5, 2011 9:24 AM |
Score: 3 (3 votes cast)
Posted on February 5, 2011 09:24
11. Posted by Jay Guevara | February 5, 2011 1:31 PM | Score: 1 (1 votes cast)
Sooner or later someone will remember and tell the surviving twin - then mommy and daddy will have to explain it to him - Somehow I don't think that will go over real well
I had exactly the same thought. They're one family argument away from catastrophe.
A modest proposal: if they're going to kill a family member, why not make it fair and have everyone in the family draw lots to find out who it'll be? Mom? Dad?
11. Posted by Jay Guevara | February 5, 2011 1:31 PM |
Score: 1 (1 votes cast)
Posted on February 5, 2011 13:31
12. Posted by hermie | February 5, 2011 2:19 PM | Score: 2 (2 votes cast)
First they claimed that elective abortion was necessary in cases of the mother's health.
Then 'health' was expanded to include mental and emotional states.
Now it is ok because it is a matter of 'convenience'.
12. Posted by hermie | February 5, 2011 2:19 PM |
Score: 2 (2 votes cast)
Posted on February 5, 2011 14:19
13. Posted by BlueNight | February 5, 2011 4:06 PM | Score: 1 (1 votes cast)
I didn't think it was possible, but now there's a study which makes this pricedure even more appalling:
As published in the October PLoS ONE, the scientists found that fetuses begin reaching toward their neighbors by the 14th week of gestation. Over the following weeks they reduced the number of movements toward themselves and instead reached more frequently toward their counterparts. By the 18th week they spent more time contacting their partners than themselves or the walls of the uterus. Almost 30 percent of their movements were directed toward their prenatal companions. These movements, such as stroking the head or back, lasted longer and were more accurate than self-directed actions, such as touching their own eyes or mouth.
from Scientific American Mind Magazine
13. Posted by BlueNight | February 5, 2011 4:06 PM |
Score: 1 (1 votes cast)
Posted on February 5, 2011 16:06
14. Posted by Michael Laprarie | February 5, 2011 4:55 PM | Score: 1 (1 votes cast)
"There is nothing quite so terrible as evil masquerading as virtue." - Dietrich Bonhoeffer
14. Posted by Michael Laprarie | February 5, 2011 4:55 PM |
Score: 1 (1 votes cast)
Posted on February 5, 2011 16:55