Gets my goat

I want to talk briefly about a NY Times magazine article on reducing twin pregnancies. I'm one of those women who doesn't believe in abortion...for herself. But my personal feelings on what I would do I don't think are relevant to the legal system, and so I am absolutely 100% pro-choice.

However.

If you're a 45 year-old woman who ALREADY HAS KIDS and you go through fertility treatment to HAVE ANOTHER CHILD and then you decide to ABORT ONE OF YOUR TWIN FETUSES when that treatment finally works, there is nothing about that equation that isn't selfish. It's about as bad as going to adopt a child, finding out that child has a twin who also needs to be adopted, and adopting just the one. Okay, it's not that bad, but it's close.

If this had been a 45-year-old woman who had never had children, would I have a problem with this? A little, but not really, especially if she were a single woman. Twins are not triplets, but for someone who's desperate to have a SINGLE CHILD in their lifetime but can't afford another, fine. Having a third kid, though (or whatever number--the article isn't clear how many kids this hideous woman already has), is icing. No one writes that movie of the week. It's already so unnecessary. It's having a cat and a dog, but then deciding your apartment isn't overrun enough, let's get yet another.

And you can see she sees the act as a shopping experience, because if she had gotten pregnant with twins naturally, she says she wouldn't have aborted one. WTF?

I really don't want any comments about how abortion is wrong. This isn't about abortion. This is about the commodification of life, and since we're a throwaway society, we throw away the purchases that we don't like. This woman had no medical reason to get rid of the extra child, and since she said she wouldn't have reduced if it were natural, then clearly money isn't that much of a problem, it's her point of view that has morphed into thinking life has more or less meaning if it comes from a tube or a night in the sack with the mister. And that's what's fucked up.