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7/21/04 "The Two Americas" Sen. John Edwards made the theme of his campaign that there are two Americas, that of the haves on the one hand and that of the have-nots on the other. In the wake of the 2000 election, much was made of the chasm between the Red states and the Blue states. A recent piece in The New York Times Magazine demonstrates another divide. The July 18, 2004 issue sported a piece by and about a woman who struggled with a dilemma when she found out she was pregnant with triplets. Should she move to Staten Island with her live-in boyfriend and "start shopping only at Costco and buying big jars of mayonnaise", or should she be more practical and preserve some remnants of her New York lifestyle by the "selective reduction" of her triplets to a single? The doctor (a "selective reduction" specialist?) was willing to inject poison into the hearts of two of the three fetuses (she would get to choose which ones, unless one of them was a runt, in which case he would help her choose to have the runt preferentially "reduced") because the risk of complications with triplets is significantly higher than it is with a single pregnancy. But the mother herself mentioned this concern as his, not hers: "There are a lot more complications when a woman carries multiples. And so, from the doctor's perspective, it's a matter of trying to save the woman this trauma." And from the woman's perspective, it is fortuitous that the doctor will, by saving her the trauma, just happen at the same time to be preserving her access to the opera, the stage, and all the other pretentious things that somehow seem so much more important when you find out there are three distinct, and distinctly human, heartbeats in your womb (that will grow up and expect to be fed, clothed, bathed, and shuffled off to expensive day care fifty hours a week). To his credit, her live-in boyfriend was more than a little disturbed at the idea they were going to walk into a room with three beating hearts of their own flesh and blood, and "make two disappear." But note his language. He said they were making them disappear, not that they were injecting poison to stop them beating, and that afterward the little cadavers would have to be removed. She didn't mention whether or not they buried them. But that is a question they don't ask in the other America. In the other America, the woman's right to the opera is easily counterbalanced against the right of a fetus, who lives off her blood by the natural acquiescence of her body, to continue his or her existence long enough to achieve viability. In the other America, there is an infinite gulf between the suffering of a newborn who is smothered or left to drown in amniotic fluid, an act of cruelty which is worthy of at least a few weeks in jail, and the suffering of a fetus whose induced heart attack probably kills her more quickly (and you can't prove she felt anything, anyway). After all, it wasn't her body (yet), it was her mother's that was at risk! (In the other America, you don't have your own body until they cut the umbilical cord.) There's a lesson in this for little Johnny, who survived the "selective reduction" that reduced his two siblings to a couple of lumps of tissue processed through wastewater reclamation, as they indoctrinate him into that America which views the unborn as less worthy than the born (even if they are more viable, by the way): "The people of the other America, little Johnny, are misogynists. They want women to be reduced to baby-making machines. After all, they think I should have given birth to three babies just because I had three fetuses in my womb when I was pregnant with you. They SAY they believe that your two siblings had as much right to live as you did, but they forget that they were in my body, and so it was my choice whether they lived or died. I never asked them to be conceived, and they never got my permission to implant in my uterus (the stupid thing just goes along doing its thing, never considering what the consequences will be for my social calendar). "Why did I choose you, Johnny? Well, I didn't really choose you. It was more like, I said, well, there's the two identical twins, and there's the fraternal twin. It seemed somehow more elegant or economical not so split up the twins, so we had the doctor inject them with the poison that killed them. I suppose if you had been one of the twins, YOUR heart would have been one of those injected with poison. Not to worry, you wouldn't have known the difference, since obviously you couldn't 'know' anything before you were even born! The fact is, there were three of you, and I didn't have any particular attachment to any one of you, I just knew I only wanted one. "Those misogynists in the other America say that there's something sick in what I'm telling you, that a value system that allows human life to be put on a scale and balanced against convenience and social considerations is a value system devoid of the basic respect due all of humanity. But what do they know? They don't go to the opera, and if they did, they wouldn't appreciate it the way I do." Did I mention that she stopped using birth control because the side effects were annoying to her? She conceived three children because she didn't want the inconvenience of birth control, and she had two of them killed because she didn't want the inconvenience of raising multiple children. This woman definitely lives in a different America. Fortunately, of those who responded to a question attached to the web version of this story, 75% (as of today, July 21, 2004) had said "selective reduction" should not be allowed. Perhaps there are more in my America than there are in hers. I certainly hope so. Modified: 09/10/2004 |
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