I’ve written before about the horrible practice of “toin coss” abortions, where one healthy twin is aborted because (for whatever unacceptable reason) the mother does not want to have two babies born.
In a shocking story from Australia, a healthy 32-week twin was “accidentally” aborted when doctors mistakenly killed the healthy twin when they were attempting to abort the sick twin, as the Australian Herald Sun paper reports:
A Victorian mother, pregnant with twin boys she had already named, had made the agonising decision to abort one of the babies on doctors’ advice.
She had been told that one twin had a congenital heart defect that would require years of operations, if he survived at all.
An ultrasound clinician had checked the healthy baby, who was in a separate sac to the sick baby, before the termination.
But just after 2.30pm on Tuesday the wrong baby was injected, terminating the healthy pregnancy.
The mother then had an emergency caesarean section and the sick child was terminated in a three-hour operation.
The hospital has announced there will be an “investigation” into what went wrong. But obviously what went wrong is that doctors suggested to the mother that she abort one of her twins. The hospital in a statement called the mistake a “terrible tragedy” but how would they have described the outcome if the doctors had made the right choice about which child to abort? Would that be a “resounding success”?!
Steven Ertelt at LifeNews notes that this case in Australia is not the first example of this happening:
Officials in Italy, in 2007, investigated a botched abortion done on twin brothers where the healthy brother became the victim of the abortion and the twin, who has Down syndrome, lived. The disabled brother was the target of the abortion procedure and the case is raising the ugly specter of abortions done to kill disabled people. The abortion was done on a 38-year-old woman in Milan.
Stories such as these illustrate how society forgets about and ignores human dignity whenever abortion is legalized and promoted by health care workers as the proper means of responding to challenging situations such as this one. The only acceptable answer, of course, to every human life, is love, not a procedure designed to kill a child who is vulnerable and needs extra care.
