IVF mom confesses: I wouldn’t have aborted my twin if I had conceived naturally

by Kathleen Gilbert

August 15, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Unlike aborting a child conceived naturally, ending the life of an unborn child conceived by in-vitro fertilization (IVF) feels like “just another choice” in an already “consumerish” process, one IVF mom confessed in an article for the New York Times.

“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,” the mom, “Jenny,” told author Ruth Padawer.

“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.”

Padawer explained in the article that the couple decided to abort the twin because they felt that, “at best, she could give each one only half of her attention and, she feared, only half of her love.” The couple had to fly in a doctor from thousands of miles away because local physicians refused to abort their twin.

While initially a remedy for IVF “megapregnancies” (when numerous embryos unexpectedly survive the implantation process), so-called “selective reduction” abortions have became an option for pregnancies as common and normal as twins.

But aborting a twin has proven difficult to swallow even for the pro-abortion IVF business culture, and many doctors, while allowing other abortions, still refuse to commit them on a twin. One expert quoted in Padawer’s article recalled how, when the question of killing one twin was put to his clinic staff in the late 1990s, “every one of them - the sonographer, the genetic counselors, the schedulers - supported abortion rights, but all confessed their growing unease with reductions to a singleton.”

Padawer ended the article with the story of two anonymous lesbians who both learned they were pregnant with twins through IVF on the first birthday of their son, who was also conceived by IVF. One woman miscarried, and the other aborted one of her unborn children.

While “grateful” that the abortion was possible, the latter woman, who is due in December, said she still wondered if she chose “the right one.”

“Even as it was happening, I wondered what the future would have been if the doctor had put the needle into the other one,” she said.