Self

Tonight I picked up a copy of Self magazine - not a copy I bought - just a copy I had a few minutes to read. In the back of this recent issue was an article on women who become pregnant with multiple babies (embryos) due to fertility drugs/procedures, then decide on "selective reduction," otherwise known as killing a few of their kids...

It told stories of several women who were dying to be pregnant and have babies of their own, they go through fertility treatments then become pregnant with more than one or two babies, and decide that is just not going to work for them, their lives, their health, "oh how could I give birth to a child knowing I'm going to put him or her at risk of being handicapped due to this multiple birth?" The article told of many women who decide to "selectively reduce" their pregnancy.

One woman, like the others, was hoping for children, she took the drugs, she went to the doctor, and saw 6 little heartbeats on the screen. (Do you think that when God created us he knew one day we'd be looking at our babies' heartbeats on a computer monitor? I bet Eve couldn't fathom that.) She had been pro-life, so she and her husband agonized over this decision. At the 12 week mark they decided they had to get rid of 3 of their little ones. She lay on the doctor's table, crying, as the doctor injected poison into one little beating heart. They watched it on the monitor, and miraculously, the heart kept on beating. Her uterus was too tense to continue. She ran out of the doctor's office hysterical, thinking she couldn't go through with it!

Pause here: I would think at this point that a miracle had happened, maybe this is a sign from God to not proceed with destruction.

She and her husband cried all day, got up the next morning and thought "we have to do this." They went back to the doctor, who killed 3 little hearts. Twenty minutes later, they only saw 3 heartbeats on the screen.

The article says many women cannot share this pain with others, because how do you tell your family you were supposed to have more babies???

This woman, who went from 6 to 3 babies, gave birth early, like many multiple births. One of her 3 babies had some physical/developmental problems at birth, and was hospitalized for a while. And this mom says she has no regrets now, because she cannot imagine having more kids and putting them through what her little sick baby went through (the other 2 were healthy). Kill a few kids to make it better for the rest? No, that's not okay. I wondered as I was typing this if maybe the baby with developmental problems was the one whose heart was injected the first time, could he have survived that and had health problems upon birth?

Interestingly enough, the article quoted Dr. Jeffrey Keenan, a doctor who they said is a member of Christian Medical Association (my employer several years ago) - and this doctor basically says (my paraphrase): "Do you want a Utopian society where everything is perfect and no pregnancy has problems or risks or challenges? That's not real life. If you can't handle that, don't get pregnant."

Wow. We live in a world where people postpone having children, then when they're ready their bodies won't produce children, so using expensive scientific techniques they conceive more babies than they want, so they kill them when they're tiny and helpless... all to have the ideal happy little family.

And that, was a perfect article for that magazine. That, my readers, is Self.


*I do want to clarify: infertility is one of the most heartbreaking things I can imagine, and fertility treatment is not necessarily a bad idea - it can produce precious little human beings, created by God! Yet this mindset of people conceiving more babies than they want then killing them off is so wrong! Therefore I'm venting about this selfish world we live in.