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The Half Abortion: Only Keeping One Twin

August 14, 2011 at 8:31 pm , by 

Eight months.

In today’s publication of the New York Times, there is an article entitled The Two-Minus-One Pregnancy. It tells of the growing number of women who are pregnant with twins and choose to abort only one of the fetuses, and allowing the other to survive.  In other words, these women are having a “half abortion.”

According to the article, New York’s Mount Sinai Medical Center performed 101 abortions last year; 38 of those pregnancy terminations involved a mother pregnant with twins who decided to only abort one unborn child.  And that’s just one medical center in the entire country.

One mother who used fertility drugs to get pregnant, then aborted only one fetus, gives her reasoning for the decision:

“If I had conceived these twins naturally, I wouldn’t have reduced this pregnancy, because you feel like if there’s a natural order, then you don’t want to disturb it. But we created this child in such an artificial manner — in a test tube, choosing an egg donor, having the embryo placed in me — and somehow, making a decision about how many to carry seemed to be just another choice. The pregnancy was all so consumerish to begin with, and this became yet another thing we could control.”

What is it about the idea of a half abortion that somehow seems more difficult to grasp than a “normal” abortion?  The immediate thing that comes to mind is that it is an ultimate case of “playing God.” As if a “normal” abortion wasn’t already giving one person the authority to choose another human being’s ability to live, a half abortion gives a person the ability to decide which unborn child deserves to live and which one deserves to die. That’s playing God, times two.

Is there any justification for a half abortion? The article in the New York Times gives several examples of why women made their decision:

1. The mother was 45 years old and already had children.  She felt financially insecure, as well as, too old to have twins.

2. The mother was known as a “good parent,” highly devoted to her children.  Pregnant with twins, she decided she couldn’t be equally devoted to two more; just one.

3. The mother already had a son. Then she got pregnant with twins; a boy and a girl.  She chose to keep the girl.

4. Many of these mothers were in their 2nd marriage and already have kids from their previous marriages.  Twins would have been too complicated, compared to only one more addition to the family.

5.  Some were single mothers.

6. Some mothers did not want to jeopardize their education.

7. Some did not want to jeopardize their careers.

8. One woman’s husband was an officer in the Army, fighting in Iraq. They already had a few kids.  Twins were too much a risk if something happened to her husband.

For those of us unfamiliar with the idea of a half abortion until today, we now make a decision in our own minds of whether it is ethically justifiable or wrong. The fact that The New York Times is doing a story about it says something in and of itself: This is not your typical “gray area” moral dilemma.

This isn’t a discussion about whether abortion is right or wrong, in general.  Honestly, “pro-choice vs. pro-life” debates bore me. Polls show that our nation is split 50/50 on abortion.  Most of us have already made up our minds on the issue and the truth is, we are not going to convince each other otherwise via comments on a blog post; especially if we ourselves play God by judging other people’s character and life decisions.

I hope it is clear that I am not asking anyone to cast stones, but instead to think with an open mind about a tough issue that has some undeniable ethical questions surrounding it. I enjoy mature, mutually respectable, deep conversations. Therefore, I’m curious to know how other people feel about the “two minus one pregnancy.”  What ethical issues does the half abortion raise?

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Jack William Meets Evan Carlos

August 11, 2011 at 11:11 pm , by 

Eight months.

Though Jack has been attending day care for a couple of weeks now, I still have been wondering what it would be like when he would be exposed to another little boy about his age and size, in a different environment.  I had these preconceived  ideas that it might be difficult for them to get along, fighting over toys.  I envisioned myself cringing, just waiting for the moment when one of them would smack the other in the forehead with a wooden block or a Matchbox car.

I guess I forgot that infant boys don’t have that much testosterone, yet. Fortunately, Jack’s first encounter with a buddy wasn’t at all as I bleakly imagined it.  While in Sacramento last week, we visited Jill’s childhood friend, Paula; she and her husband had their first child just a few months before Jack was born.

It was funny to observe Jack and Evan (Paula’s son) playing next to each other from the same toy box. Several times they reached for the same toy, then they would both simultaneously back off from it, as if to say, “No, it’s cool.  You go ahead. You saw it first.”

If only we lived in a world with “baby subtitles,” where we adults could translate what our children are saying to us and each other.

For most of the visit, I imagined  in my head what their conversations were like as they were playmates:

“So, you’re Evan? Yeah, my mom has talked a lot about you.  Actually, I’ve seen a lot of your pictures on Facebook.  There’s this one where you’re wearing one of those taxi cab driver hats.  My mom got me one of those but I kept taking it off because I can’t stand having stuff on my head.  It makes me itch.”

“Yep, I’ve heard of you too.  I wonder why our moms are laughing at us right now.  I’m hungry.  Let’s eat.  Wahhhhh!!! Waahhhh! Ehhhhh…”.

“Okay, sounds good.  Bluhhh!!!  Mehm-mehm-mehm-mehm…”.

Being that Jill and Paula grew up together and remain friends despite the long distance and that they still see each other at least once a year when we fly out to California in the summer, I think it’s safe to say that Jack and Evan will grow up knowing each other too.  Even if that means just one actual play date a year and in the meantime their Mommies pointing to a Facebook picture, saying, “Look, here’s your buddy.”

Jack has made his first friend.

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Happy 30th Birthday to My Wife!

August 11, 2011 at 6:02 am , by 

Eight months.

There have been more than a few people who were surprised when they learned that I am not married to a girl in her early 20′s; instead I am only three months older than she is. Today, my wife Jill turns 30 years old.

We were both born in 1981, graduated high school in 1999, and had our first child in 2010. Not only is my wife my best friend, but we have experienced the same amount of living. In 2007 when we started dating, our timelines became one as we have shared our lives together ever since.

For our first dance at our wedding reception in 2008, we actually had two songs played back to back: “Everything” by Michael Buble was a more natural, understandable selection, which represented our “normal” sides.  But we felt the need to also include a song that represented our mutual quirkiness, too.  So we chose the weirdly beautiful, “The Luckiest” by Ben Folds.

In “The Luckiest,” Ben Folds explores the idea of the importance of a shared timeline, answering the idea of what life would be like had the love of his life not been born in the right year:

“What if I’d been born fifty years before you
In a house on a street where you lived?
Maybe I’d be outside as you passed on your bike
Would I know?”

I imagine the statistical chances of the two of us being born in the same basic era of time, as opposed to decades or centuries apart. Instead, we were born in the same year and did find each other.

Jill and I have this plan to die naturally in our sleep while holding hands when we are 80 years old.  Sure, we realize we have zero control over the previous sentence ever becoming true, but it’s how we’d like to think our shared love comes to an earthly end.

Speaking of, “The Luckiest” also addresses this issue:

“Next door there’s an old man who lived to his nineties
And one day passed away in his sleep.
And his wife; she stayed for a couple of days
And passed away.
I’m sorry, I know that’s a strange way to tell you that I know we belong.”

The two of us are normal enough to play Michael Buble at our wedding reception for our first dance, but we’re also off-beat enough to play a Ben Folds song that talks about the “luckiness” of being born in the same time era, as well as, dying near the same time in old age.

I’m aware of my natural ability to be weird and abstract.  But somehow that worked for me and my wife chose to spend her life with me.  To quote Ben Folds one last time:

“I love you more than I have ever found a way to say to you… I am the luckiest.”

Happy Birthday Jill!

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In Flight Entertainment from Sacramento to Phoenix

August 9, 2011 at 11:51 pm , by 

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Getting My Infant to Sleep through the Night

August 8, 2011 at 9:29 pm , by 

Eight months.

“Crying it out” plus “cold turkey” equals “everybody’s happy!”

It was only pretty recently (the beginning of July) that I was able to master getting my infant son Jack to sleep.  After he learned to crawl at six months old, my wife nor I were no longer able to get him to sleep without him (and us) getting extremely upset.  So I tried my own version of the “cry it out” method and it has worked great.  I highly recommend it.

Unfortunately, we soon realized that the getting to sleep was only the first half of the problem.  Even though we could get him to fall asleep, he was not able to remain asleep for more than a couple of hours.  That meant that none of the three of us were ever getting enough sleep (especially my wife and my son).  Additionally, it meant our son was drinking at least three bottles of formula during the night and therefore needing three additional diaper changes.

After a decent amount of research, and obviously acknowledging the immediate effectiveness of the “cry it out” method, my wife gave me the green light to apply the “cold turkey” method to get him to sleep through the night without needing to eat.  So I did.  And it is so awesome.  Life is beautiful, now.

Here’s what I did the first night of applying the “cold turkey” method: When I put him to sleep for the night (around 7:00 PM), I closed his bedroom door most of the way, then I didn’t come back until the morning when he cried after 6:00 AM.

On the first night of going “cold turkey,” he woke up after an hour and cried for 30 minutes straight, but then fell asleep for two solid hours.  Then he woke up and cried for 10 minutes and fell asleep for three hours.  Next he woke up and cried for 5 minutes, then another couple of hours.  As the night progressed, he continued to sleep longer and cry less.

We heard him cry at 5:40 AM, but knew not to go get him yet since it was still before 6:00 AM.  So we waited, and the next time he cried it was an hour later, and we went to go get him.

I can honestly say that the three of us were never happier to see each other in the morning.  Jack had survived his first night without eating since his dinner meal; plus, his diaper was dry.  And we, the parents, both were able to sleep more solidly than any other night while being in the same house with him.

More than a month has passed since that first night; this system has been so good for all of us.  Now when he does wake up in the middle of the night it only takes a couple of minutes for him to get back to sleep- on his own.

We had been hindering his sleep by continuing to feed him through the night; preventing him from progressing deeper into his sleep cycle because we would comfort him not only with food, but with additional soothing. Therefore we fed him too often and he never learned to fall asleep without parental help. We had been enabling him to overeat and under-sleep.

Have you half-way considered this technique, in your desperation to get your infant to sleep, but just felt that A) it was too cruel, B) it would mess up your kid psychologically, and/or C) you never knew any nice, normal parents to ever do this method?

Well, I am indeed a nice, normal parent who believes in the importance of raising my son in the most positively reinforced ways possible. I came to the conclusion I was hurting him more by not teaching him to fall asleep on his own.  And I can obviously see that, so far, I have not messed him up psychologically and he still treats me the same.

But if you should have any doubts, continue reading The Dadabase every day.  That way, you can still check in on my son to make sure that both the “cry it out” and the “cold turkey” methods are not only effective, but for my son at least, they are also a good and necessary thing.