Killing Seven to Save One

You have to imagine, first, the seven babies curled and fitted around each other like puppies in a basket. Each has his or her separate water-filled sac, and within these sacs they rest or exercise, sometimes jostling their neighbors. At this age their limbs appear long and fingers bony, because acquiring baby fat is next month's job. If there had been more room to grow, each would be about 10 inches tall.

There is not enough room; it's not good for there to be so many. But the mother wanted children so much that she used drugs to get them, and she wound up getting as many as she could hold. The doctor offered to terminate a few lives in order to enhance others, but she refused. She wanted all her babies.

Now add something to the picture: the babies are diseased. An infection spread from the mother to her children, and bacteria races through their frail bodies. No medication can heal them. The illness teeming in the mother's womb makes her weaker day by day. Death is in sight--for eight, or only seven.

The mother, it is said, will recover. It is one of nature's cruder jokes that at a minimum we imagine she will feel empty.

An extraordinary situation like this lies so far outside the typical abortion scenario as to stall reflexive polarization. Twenty-seven years after Roe v. Wade, we have our default switches pretty much set; at the very word "abortion" we click into position-defense mode.

But here are unique, almost bizarre variables, to confound even the most programmed thinker. The concept of seven unborn babies in itself is simultaneously appealing and unsettling. Add the information that all seven are wracked with infection--the womb itself bursting with illness--and the image becomes revolting. Yet we could also empathize with the misery of these sick children, each suffering in a separate capsule, never in this life to touch another human being.

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