Misplaced Romanticism

Whoever wants a child so badly that it interferes with rational thought needs to be protected from him or herself. Reproductive health is still about life and death.

Can one life be compared to another? The birth of octuplets in the United States has set off an ethical debate. Not only can reproductive health make new life possible, it also requires decisions to be made that can lead to the death of embryos.

What should be done in the case of twins in the womb if, 12 weeks prior to delivery, one of the twins becomes ill enough to require a premature Caesarean section which would deprive the other twin of valuable developmental time in the womb? And might lead to possible life-long damage?

What about a woman who has been desperately hoping for years to get pregnant and undergoes fertility treatment and becomes pregnant? What if she fails to go for regular checkups where her doctor might discover that she has too many eggs? Five, six, maybe even eight? He would urgently advise her to refrain from sex during that cycle or to use a condom, or perhaps prescribe progesterone that would prevent conception. Perhaps she just didn’t heed her doctor’s advice. Maybe her husband refuses to use condoms.

The bottom line is, she’s pregnant. Five or six fertilized eggs continue to develop. Five or six potential babies over whose lives clouds already begin to gather. Their presence might kill the mother; several of them might develop such serious conditions in the womb that they’re unable to survive. But even if they make it into the world with reasonably good health, what does life have in store for them even if they develop normally? Maybe the parents can’t afford living quarters large enough for a family that size. Maybe they have to make it on a teacher’s or nurse’s salary; that’s hardly sufficient to raise one child let alone six. Breast feeding? Forget it, the mother would be nursing constantly. Even bottle-feeding would be a gargantuan task if she had to do it herself. Depression, nervous breakdown, divorce are often the result of multiple births.

All that is avoidable, but it requires so-called fetucide, the targeted killing of one or more fetuses in the womb by coronary injection. A woman who yearned for a baby for so long is supposed to make the decision to go ahead with this terrible procedure in order to increase the chance of survivability of the other babies? She should be asked to make the decision how many of the others to kill? No way. Yet it happens hundreds of times every year in Germany, although no physician likes to do it.

For decades, the German public has been discussing, often with a hidden fist clenched, the German penal code and how and when abortion should be allowed. But when it comes to preventing fetucide, our lawmakers fail miserably, and artificial insemination too often leads to the necessity for more of it.

Medical advances have made it possible for man to help bring life into the world but the risks involved for the women being treated are often too much for them to face alone.

Every woman seeking an abortion has to undergo counseling. A woman undergoing hormone therapy has to make the decision of whether she wants faces the risk of a multiple pregnancy by herself. Even if a woman casually accepts the personal risks of a multiple birth, society has a responsibility here as well. Mandatory and regularly scheduled monitoring of multiple pregnancies by trained physicians would be a sensible requirement.

Legislators have an obligation to protect those with an irrational desire for children from themselves, to protect them from decisions made for romantic rather than realistic reasons. When it comes to deciding whether or not to conceive, romanticism alone is the wrong advisor.