This isn't a diary about abortion, but rather about other reproductive choices that in turn have made me question whether we as a society are doing the right thing by allowing families to have certain, seemingly unregulated, options.
Ryan and Brianna Morrison, who at age 24 and after only a year of attempting to conceive turned to fertility treatments (the drug Follistim), ended up with six embryos.
Although they were NOT so religious as to believe that their barrenness had been God's will, they WERE too religious to consider a selective reduction of six embryos to two, and so continued the sextuplet pregnancy against medical advice. They thus became the poster child for the religious right.
Why certain aspects of science are "from God" and others are "not from God," and how you tell them apart--well, that's nor for me to attempt to parse.
For some reason that has not made it into the press, the sextuplets were delivered at 22 weeks' gestation, weighing in at between 11 oz. and 1 lb 3 oz. A baby born after only 24 weeks' gestation has a 50 percent survival rate. A baby born at 22 weeks' gestation has almost no chance of survival, and if he or she does survive, has an almost 100 percent chance of grave disability.
So far, as CNN has reported, three of the Morrisons' sextuplets have died, one by one. I fully expect that the rest will also die, but not until after having been subjected to pokings and proddings, loud noises and harsh lights. And instead of taking home one or two healthy babies they will take home none.
Any baby that DOES survive the NICU experience relies on medical science and on the ministrations of doctors. Many of these ministrations are painful and are not performed under anesthesia, but the neonatologists figure that the costs outweigh the benefits, if after an average of $41,000 per NICU stay (much more for micropreemies), apneas and bradycardias, undeveloped lungs, the inability to suck, swallow and breathe, anemias and blood transfusions, the possibility of blindness from retinopathy of prematurity, necrotizing enterocolitis (i.e. your intestines dying) and brain bleeds you can end up with a baby that you can take home with you. A baby who will eventually grow up and live a life that we would recognize as dignified and worthwhile. The Morrisons will have no such baby.
This whole episode has made me SO ANGRY. I don't support people's "choice" to select those aspects of science that they think benefit them and discard the rest, at the cost of pain and suffering for living babies and a huge cost to society. The doctors who cared for the Morrisons were pretty irresponsible in allowing this to come about (high-order multiples are considered a "failure" in fertility assistance circles). The Morrisons were irresponsible and uneducated, and who knows how they are interpreting these turns of events (as God's will?). But I feel like we as a society are also implicated, by allowing the irresponsible use of reproductive technologies in a way that is harmful. I don't like those choices.