Two Minus One Pregnancy: Article from the NY Times Magazine

Two Minus One
I just saw this article posted on the resolve  forum.This article discusses how some women are reducing twins down to one. This is something I never thought would happen. I debated about whether or not to post it. I think it is good to be informed about what is going on. Beware,  reading this article might make you cry and/or get really angry.

A few months back a woman got mad at me when I posted on the resolve forum a link to my "10 reasons to choose napro over IVF".One of the reasons listed was napro does not cause reduction of babies in the womb. She told me that nobody does that anymore and was offended that I posted it. I am going to keep this article  for the next time someone attacks Napro. I decided to post this article so women will know that unfortunately it does still happen.

I wrote the author of the article and requested that she write an article about napro. She wrote me back and said she is going to keep the link I sent her in case she decided to pursue this topic. At least she did not ignore me.

When I first wrote this post I just  copied a lot of quotes. Then I let it sit and decided to come back. I was too angry the first time to post what I felt. Now I think I can write something without screaming.

I think most of the women in the article already had kids so getting twins was not in their ideal plan. Well guess what being infertile was not part of my plan either. They were blessed with two but because they were spoiled they did not see it as a blessing. Most of us IF women, myself including, would love twins. It is so sad that these women feel that they should kill their extra children instead of putting them up for adoption.

The other issue  is that when women create babies in a lab, it turns into something artificial, impersonal, and control/decision/perfectionist oriented. Lives are discarded because they are imperfect or inconvenient.

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The article is 7 pages long. Here are some quotes from the article: .

“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.”
 
"No agency tracks how many reductions occur in the United States, but those who offer the procedure report that demand for reduction to a singleton, while still fairly rare, is rising. Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York, one of the largest providers of the procedure, reported that by 1997, 15 percent of reductions were to a singleton. Last year, by comparison, 61 of the center’s 101 reductions were to a singleton, and 38 of those pregnancies started as twins."

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