Take your "Godliness" and shove it 6 feet under with your dead babies

[trinityvixen]

Wow, two uses of that "I hate people" tag in one day!

Before I get into this rant which will pretty much cement my reputation for being an evil librul bebbie killah, a note: I totally support fertility treatments. I am not opposed to them at all. I think anyone who wants to have a kid, who can support one and love one but who has trouble conceiving one should be able to do a course of fertility treatments if that is their wish. (I would prefer more people adopt, but I would never say they had to.)

THAT SAID...

Via Dan Savage, I got to this story about a Mormon Couple who used artificial means to conceive...and then remembered that they're supposed to let God sort out those messy fertility decisions. You know, like how he doesn't make it possible for most women to be able to have six babies at once and have all of them survive? That's totally cool. But removing two or so of them prior to God making that decision so that four, rather than two could have made it? That's MURDER.

I love this one commenter on Savage's post:

"Nature (procreation, not your strong subject) is a miraculous process that we as humans are never going to fully understand we can just admire it and let the process invented by the one who created us take its course. It has worked for millennia, its why you're here, you just have refused to take part of it and that's why you cannot understand it. "

Yep, birthing has worked for many thousands of years. If you weren't a creationist cretin, you'd realize that actually birthing has worked for reproductive method for, oh, millions of years, a, and that actually its killed a shit-ton of mothers and fetuses over those millions, b. It's not a process we can't know unless we take your airy indifferent attitude toward it. It's funny, but if we actually try to understand it, we DO understand it! I mean, the doctor told this couple that if they had all six fetuses develop they'd pretty much all die or be horribly crippled for life. And what do you know? He was right! Isn't that funny how the guy who knows a lot about having babies and keeps studying the effects on people having babies of, well, having babies, he knows stuff? This is nuts!

I would feel bad for these people who watched four of these babies who were clearly not meant to be die, if they hadn't brought this upon themselves. Next time you promise to live by God's will, perhaps you should just hope and pray for that fertility, huh? Losing a few cells in week three is a hell of a lot less traumatic than watching 70% formed babies die from complications you could have avoided.

Comments

[chuckro.livejournal.com]

I just started Dan Savage's book The Kid on the train last night, and one of the first things that he talks about is the long discussion about fertility issues at the adoption agency. He disgresses and muses about it for a while, but is much less overly impacted than the straight couples there because, well, he's been functionally infertile since puberty. But it makes for an interesting musing about how much people tie their identity, their sense of self-worth, and their magical godly goodness into being able to have biological children. Which explains why they'll go to such lengths to do so.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

There's a very real loss that comes with a known miscarriage of any kind, whether it is natural or induced. It's just, as my mom's friend told her, a shit situation. End of story.

However, I cannot for the life of me figure out why anyone weighs the loss of a few cells against watching tiny, unformed babies die in an incubator, and decides the former is more unbearable. It has almost nothing to do with that insanity of needing your own biological babies. You'd have those regardless of the decision to reduce with this group. It has everything to do with a blatant disregard for trauma--to the woman carrying the babies (multiple births are dangerous and to the babies that will never be.

The issue of biological identity is an issue that could be worked on with better acceptance of non-straight, non-nuclear families. More acknowledgment of atypical families could really stress the idea that family is where you find love and care, end of story. Once we get away from the idea that genetic love is destiny and anything else is a poor approximation, I would hope this nonsense would die off.

[oblvndrgn.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't say it's all just about disregard for trauma. Humans are notoriously bad at predicting the impact of future events. Emotions and whatnot. If you feel that a few cells is life, despite being only a few cells, then you are weighing the [real, tangible] death of a few cells versus the [future, imaginary] death of babies. You are completely correct that the rational objective view says that even in that case the first one is easier to deal with, but most people get bogged down in the now-feeling rather than the then-feeling.

[lithoglyphic.livejournal.com]

It's probably the fact that one negative outcome (induced miscarriage) requires an action, while the other is passive (eventual death of babies / risk to mother). They *feel* more responsibility for the action than the inaction. If they'd done a selective reduction, they'd probably feel more guilt having committed the horrible sin of murdering the unborn. If the babies die through their inaction, on the other hand, it's so easy for them to say "out of our hands - after all, they *could* have lived!"