APRIL 1999

Seven babies. Imagine. Seven. All at once. Well, perhaps "underdone fetuses" would be more accurate. Every so often you read about such unusual births. Those tiny 2-pound entities are somewhere between zygote and viable human being, but just where along that spectrum is hard to pinpoint. And, because of that, normal health is a rarity in such cases.

There must be a compassionate compromise between giving birth to seven premature babies and simply enduring infertility. Fertility drugs commonly result in multiple embryos for the obvious reason that they are designed to overstimulate the ovaries, which cooperate by disgorging eggs like a gumball machine. Those sperms must think, Bonanza!

This naturally creates the dilemma of implanting a human uterus with anywhere from four to nine embryos, which it was never intended to accommodate. As a rule, dogs and cats and pigs have litters, but humans have one baby at a time. Even twins are rare, and it is only medical advances, such as C-sections, that have made it possible for so many successful twin births. One generation ago it was not at all uncommon for only one twin to survive the rigors of full term pregnancy and childbirth. Today successful twinning is a happily frequent event.

But what do you do when your fierce desire for children results in a womb crammed full of hopefuls, which have zero chance of coming to full term? And there is no disagreement on this issue. All agree. No human female can carry six or so embryos to full term. It can never happen, and when the uterus finally decides enough is enough, it ejects its burdensome passengers long before they are ready for the light of day.

The tragic results are lungs, hearts, kidneys and so on that are not fully developed. One or two of these tiny creatures usually die at birth, and those remaining often require major surgery, long-term care, or both. They just aren't quite "done." So, is there a solution? Happily, there is. Unhappily, the powerful Roman Catholic Church is dead set against it. The term used by doctors is "selective reduction." The term used by the Catholic Church is murder. Here we go again.

(Reduction means just what it says. The number of embryos is reduced by means of injections, and those eliminated are resorbed back into the mother's body.)

I remember watching a poignant television documentary on this reduction procedure. Two married, childless couples were featured. They had both been faced with the same problem. They had used fertility drugs, resulting in eight embryos in one woman, and seven in the other. Children they wanted, but not like this!

The first woman stated clearly and unequivocally that she would play no part in what she called "murder." Her Church had spoken on the matter—it was just plain murder to "reduce" the number of embryos—and she obeyed. She allowed all eight embryos to work our their own destinies inside her. Her husband was in total agreement.

The second woman barely struggled at all with her decision. Knowing the impossibility of delivering seven healthy, full term babies, she opted to remove five of them and allow the remaining twins to grow inside her. Her husband was in total agreement.

The results were sadly predictable. Of the eight premature babies born to the first woman, three died the first day, and the other five were woefully malformed. One little girl had lungs that were not developed and would require a respirator, just to breathe at all, for the rest of her life. One of the boys had a brain only half the normal size, even for his tiny body, and one of his brothers had only a partial spine. And so on.

The second couple was thrilled to be parents of a healthy set of twins, a girl and a boy. At the time the documentary was filmed, the children in both families were one-and-a-half years old. There were scenes showing the twins giggling and being pushed in their swings in the backyard; then scenes as they played on a beach and splashed in the shallow water.

Then suddenly the scene shifted to a large "family" room that looked more like a hospital ward. One little girl was attached to a respirator by a lengthy hose, allowing her to walk at least that far. The tube in and around her neck, attached to the hose, made her look eerily like a dog tethered on a leash. She will have to use a respirator for as long as she lives.

One boy was slouched in a highchair, glassy-eyed and drooling. He had a drastically undersized brain and would never have a measurable I.Q. Another boy was lying in a crib, where, because of his spine, he would always remain. There were no surgeries available to allow him ever to walk or sit up.

The other two children had less serious problems, but one had a back brace and the other wore very thick glasses and could barely see. It was like a horror movie come true. And it was heart-wrenching to watch.

But when they cut back to the other family's twins, greedily eating their pudding, grinning, red-cheeked and obviously healthy, it was also impossible not to be angry. Both women had been offered the same options. They both could have ended up with one or two healthy children and neither needed to end up with a sick room full of permanently disabled babies. Once again, the Catholic Church's intractable, unreasonable stance had caused unimaginable suffering.

The martyred Mom gushed about how much she loved each and every one of her five babies, and how precious their lives were. She also said she wished the other three had survived as well. Somehow I doubt that. But what I found most maddening was her repeated references to abiding by "God's will." Over and over she prided herself on accepting "God's will." Her priest was interviewed and he too complimented her on obeying "God's will."

It occurs to me that "God's will" was that she remain childless. Taking those fertility drugs is as "unnatural" as is the process of reduction. Why was that first action deemed permissible under "God's will," while the second was not? The strained logic that fertility drugs help people to "be fruitful and multiply" while reduction has the opposite effect, is most unconvincing. Surely giving birth to twins in being fruitful. But of course if the Church approved aborting under any circumstances, even one as extremely unusual as this, it would find itself balanced precariously at the top of that famous slippery slope.

In order to be consistent about its insistence that all abortion is murder, the Church today is in a preposterous position. It must accuse a woman, who wants to give birth to healthy twins, of violating God's law about being fruitful and multiplying. This is a classic example of the kind of cruelly bizarre predicament created when archaic, inflexible laws are applied to the modern age. Those laws don't work any more, if they ever did. What could the writers of the Bible know about fertility drugs, embryo reduction, and C-sections? But the bottom line remains. The Catholic Church is mired somewhere in the tenth century, refuses to acknowledge today's world, and millions of people suffer for it.

© 1999 Judith Hayes

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