Haunting pro-abortion piece in LA Times: aborting two of four fetuses

[yurbud]

This piece was meant to be some kind of rebuttal to the recent partial birth abortion decision in the Supreme Court, but it had a very different effect on me.

I support unfettered access to abortion in the first trimester and wouldn't lose any sleep if someone I was dating took the morning after pill. I also support women's right to an abortion up to viability.

But in this story, where the couple was doing fertility treatment and too many of the fetuses turned out to be viable, it just seemed wrong that they would off two, primarily because they kept two. I would always be worried that the two I kept would find out about the others and ask or have nightmares about being chosen instead of them. Worse, if one of the keepers turned out to be a trouble child, I'd be tempted to wonder if one of the ones we flushed wouldn't have been a better choice.

Someone in my family had suggested that I be aborted before I was born even though it was illegal at the time. I think it would be more unsettling to find out that I lived because of a Sophie's Choice rather than because my mom wanted to keep the kids she made in general.

I'm not implying that any policy should be made or unmade based on my reaction to this story. It just made me uneasy.

The abortion debate brought home
He and his wife have always been pro-choice; recently, they were forced to make the Choice.
By Dan Neil
May 6, 2007

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.

We didn't want to. We didn't mean to. We didn't do anything wrong, which is to say, we did everything right. Four years ago, when Tina and I set out on this journey to have children, such a circumstance was unimaginable. And yet there I was, holding her hand, watching the ultrasound as a needle with potassium chloride found its mark, stopping the heart of one male fetus, then the other, hidden in my wife's suffering belly.

***

I mean, my wife and I have always been pro-choice, but we never expected to actually confront the Choice. After all, we've been trying like crazy to have children. We had already undergone two in-vitro fertilization procedures before this last time, when we put back five embryos, despairing that any would take. 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. We said yes, not really appreciating what that meant.

***

Some wanted to know how we decided to keep the girls. Partly, it was a matter of how the fetuses were arranged. Partly, it had to do with other factors. 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. Still, I had reservations about bringing girls into the world now, when forces seemed to be aligning to disenfranchise them (nine of 10 GOP presidential candidates favor reversing Roe vs. Wade). I hate to think my girls will have to fight the battles their mothers and grandmothers fought.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-op-neil6may06,0,2723837.story?coll=la-opinion-rightrail