Decision To Abort One Healthy Twin Met With Outrage
A new surge of outrage swept Britain on Monday after a woman who is 16 weeks pregnant and her gynecologist agreed to abort one of two healthy twin fetuses because she says she is too poor to raise twins.
Experts said the abortion would be the first known case in Britain in which a healthy fetus in a naturally conceived multiple pregnancy was aborted. Such a procedure in a multiple pregnancy, known as selective termination, is not unusual when a fetus is discovered to be unhealthy or abnormal.
The woman in this case was not identified, but it is known that she is a 28-year-old single mother who already has one child. No other details about her were disclosed.
There was an outcry from anti-abortion groups last week when the government ordered the destruction of 3,000 unclaimed human embryos in fertility clinics in keeping with a law stipulating that frozen embryos cannot be kept for more than five years without specific requests from the parents.
Doctors who agreed to carry out the abortion and others who supported it asserted that the decision was “no different from any other abortion,” in the words of Dr. Vivienne Nathanson, the head of the board of ethics at the British Medical Association.
But anti-abortion groups here and in Italy, where there was much shock last week over the frozen embryo case, have offered money to the woman to give birth to both twins and give one up for adoption.
The decision was first reported over the weekend by The Sunday Express in a front-page interview with the woman’s gynecologist, Dr. Phillip Bennett of Queen Charlotte’s Hospital in London. He said the abortion of one fetus was the solution he had proposed to the woman when she told him she could not continue the pregnancy if it meant having two children.
After the report appeared, other British dailies and television gave the story prominent coverage. A wide range of commentators expressed revulsion, with some calling the decision “uncivilized,” “horrific,” and “abhorrent.”
A spokesman at Queen Charlotte’s Hospital said that Bennett had not been in the hospital on Monday and that there would be no comment on the case, which she called “a private matter between the doctor and his patient.”
The spokesman, Nuala O’Brian, declined to say whether the abortion had been carried out, but other knowledgeable people said it had not.
Bennett told The Sunday Express that he had performed 3,000 abortions in the last 10 years and as many deliveries. Having suggested that he knew the sex of the babies, he said: “Killing one healthy twin sounds unethical, but my colleagues and I concluded this week that it would be better to terminate one pregnancy as soon as possible and leave one alive than to lose two babies.”
The technique of abortion in this case would involve piercing the selected fetus with a needle, Bennett said in the interview with The Sunday Express. That fetus is then carried for the full term of the pregnancy, “although it shrivels and mummifies” in the womb, Bennett said.
Among the unanswered questions are how the doctor selects the fetus to be aborted and whether the woman is told the sex of that fetus.