Threads by Morgana and NYer.
As Jenny lay on the obstetricians examination table, she was grateful that the ultrasound tech had turned off the overhead screen. She didnt want to see the two shadows floating inside her. Since making her decision, she had tried hard not to think about them, though she could often think of little else. She was 45 and pregnant after six years of fertility bills, ovulation injections, donor eggs and disappointment and yet here she was, 14 weeks into her pregnancy, choosing to extinguish one of two healthy fetuses, almost as if having half an abortion. As the doctor inserted the needle into Jennys abdomen, aiming at one of the fetuses, Jenny tried not to flinch, caught between intense relief and intense guilt.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
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As if the new York Times couldnt sink any further down the hole of warped and twisted pro-abortion activism, the Gray Lady is out with yet another news piece that moves the newspaper further beyond the pale.
Ruth Pawder is out today with a new story titled The Two-Minus-One Pregnancy, that focuses on selective reduction the euphemistic phrase given to name the destruction of one or more unborn children in a multiple pregnancy situation where a mother has more than one baby resulting from an IVF pregnancy involving the implantation of multiple human embryos.
The Times never makes it past the second paragraph before showing how Jenny, an IVF client, justifies the abortion of one of her twin babies because she didnt conceive naturally. Jennys remarks to the Times are ghastly:
Things would have been different if we were 15 years younger or if we hadnt had children already or if we were more financially secure, she said later. If I had conceived these twins naturally, I wouldnt have reduced this pregnancy, because you feel like if theres a natural order, then you dont 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.
But its Pawders description of Jennys actions to extinguish the live of one of her healthy babies that takes the cake for its offensiveness.
She was 45 and pregnant after six years of fertility bills, ovulation injections, donor eggs and disappointment and yet here she was, 14 weeks into her pregnancy, choosing to extinguish one of two healthy fetuses, almost as if having half an abortion, Pawder writes.
The comment was shocking even to Wendy Wright, the former president of Concerned Women for America, who has been involved in the abortion debate for decades.
This tragic outcome would have been foreseeable when choice became the ultimate god, she told LifeNews in response. Yet I doubt that anyone conceived of something so horrible, that people would deliberately conceive children then deliberately abort them simply because they are children. Morality does not change with technology; the intensity of ones moral decisions increase when beginning with the belief that you can be like God.
Wright says the Times article pulls back the curtain to reveal that women and doctors are choosing who to kill like a sniper decides who to shoot, based on short-term thinking, personal benefits and which victim is accessible. It begs us to question: when will hurting someones feelings by saying this is wrong become less important than valuing human life? Perhaps not until it is our own life at stake.
But, for Pawder and the Times, selective reduction is not a big deal because its just a little math.
What is it about terminating half a twin pregnancy that seems more controversial than reducing triplets to twins or aborting a single fetus? After all, the maths the same either way: one fewer fetus, Pawder writes.
Thats the kind of eugenic attitude that the pro-life movement must overcome.
Thread by me.
Most philosophical arguments against the personhood of embryos, fetuses or comatose patients focus on consciousness as the capacity that corresponds to the possession of moral value. Conscious human beings, even minimally conscious, are obviously one of us have interests, feel pain, perceive objects, and can offer at least rudimentary gestures of self-report. Since they are persons they should not be subjected to purely instrumental treatment such as lethal experimentation or deadly dosages of drugs. Those who cannot exercise consciousness are either not yet persons (e.g., embryos) or no longer persons (e.g., irreversibly comatose patients).
In end-of-life issues, all the high profile merciful starvation debates of the last few decades have concerned patients who have lost the capacity for consciousness (e.g., Karen Ann Quinlan, Nancy Cruzan, Terri Schiavo, Aruna Shanbaug, and Tony Bland in the U.K.). Recall the pictures of Terri Schiavo gazing up fixedly from her bed. Defenders of her starvation insisted that her fitful states of wakefulness were reflex behaviors devoid of conscious awareness, as if the question of life and death hinged on whether she was ever conscious. Opponents replied: starving living human beings is wrong whether or not they are ever conscious.
How does the secular mind deal with patients who are less than fully conscious? Are they less than fully human? If their capacity for conscious experience is compromised through severe disability, are their lives as valuable as those who are full-bodied and strong? Would it be merciful to starve one whose hope of returning to full consciousness has been lost? Euthanasia advocates, of course, have always argued that there are some lives that are not worth living. But in the jurisprudence of medicine, cases dealing with the lawful withholding of life-sustaining care from patients whose preferences are not clearly stated have drawn the line at consciousness. That line is now fading.
A British judge was recently asked to decide whether the family of brain damaged womanknown only as Mshould be allowed to withhold food and water and let her die. The 51-year-old woman, severely disabled since 2003, is not comatose, not in a PVS, and is not otherwise dying. She is very clearly conscious, but minimally so a minimally conscious state . Her nurses say she responds to music and conversation and even attempts to communicate with those around her.
But some of her caregivers believe that her life has lost all meaning: What can she possibly get out of life?, Ms sister asks. She can't move, speak and she's fed through a tube. She can't even enjoy a cup of tea.
Her sisters distress is understandable. But her conclusion that M would be better off dead is terribly misguided. Thats because the question, What can M get out of life? is misguided. It is true that most of lifes meaning is wrapped up in the conscious pursuit of human goods, in friendship and knowledge, inner peace and harmony with God. But lifes meaning is not exhausted by the purposeful pursuit of conscious goals. Even when consciousness has been lost, one great human good still remains: life. Traditional morality calls it the intrinsic goodness of human bodily life. And that goodness stands as a moral barrier between every person and every intention to harm or kill him or her.
The life of a neurologically disabled baby, or child, or adult is still good and deserves nurture and care. Caring for those who are cognitively impaired is good for the disabled, good for their caregivers and good for the community.
Ms life is good and should be protected from starvation.
But so too are Ms conscious experiences, however minimal, of being cared for, listening to music and conversing with others. Is music less enjoyable to her because of her disability? Perhaps. But perhaps she enjoys it more. Can we qualify the value of experience based upon degree neurological ability? A recent study in the British Medical Journal Open concluded that the majority of Locked-In Syndrome patients (with complete paralysis of all voluntary muscles and yet at least minimally consciousness) are happy.
Weve heard it before: deaths in her best interest; life is of no further benefit to her. Since the Cruzan case in 1990 (and the Bland Case in 1993), PVS patients have been routinely deprived of food and water with the protection of the courts. Theres no substantive ethical difference between these cases and the case of M.
But there is a symbolic difference. Even according to the liberal mind, deliberately bringing about the death of a conscious human being is killing someonekilling one of us. If the person doesnt want to die, its called murder. If he does, its assisted suicide. Consciousness notwithstanding, the case of M is being framed as a simple case of the removal of life-support. Another watershed about to be breached.
Theres little consolation in saying I told you so. Pro-lifers have argued for years that all milestones short of fertilization are arbitrary. There is nothing bright about the line of consciousness: its onset and expression at the margins of life are both elusive; the organ development necessary for its actualization supplies no light-switch moment where after the final pieces of a hard-wired system are in place, consciousness turns on. It is the gradual awakening of a multi-layered capacityinvolving the concomitant interaction of anatomical, neurochemical, physiological (and environmental) factorsradically present from fertilization unfolding along the seamless line of development that begins when the entity begins and ends for most when bodily life ceases. In other words, there is no clear line of consciousness to draw. Those who set down the line as the fateful marker of personhood, have done so by fiat. And they erase the line, as we are now seeing, by the same arbitrary means.
"We will not be silent.
We are your bad conscience.
The White Rose will give you no rest."