That is the question being asked over at Secondhand Smoke as a result of a study we reported on last week:

One of the things about our current cultural milieu that has always puzzled me is the drive to create an absolute fundamental right to procreate–and the concomitant push to permit an absolute and fundamental right to destroy unborn life. (You know how it goes: Today, the child is wanted so it is a baby. Tomorrow, the child isn’t wanted so its a fetus, not yet human life.) And when both IVF and abortion are coupled in the same pregnancy, it really makes my head spin. A new study in the UK shows that this happens more than previously thought….

So, we see IVF leading, at least in some cases, to objectification of the life created, as it furthers the contemporary sense of entitlement: I want to be pregnant–make it so! I don’t want to be pregnant, make it not so!

I once heard a Canadian bioethicist give a lecture urging women with multiple IVF-created fetuses to undergo “selective reduction”–boy, talk about a euphemism!–to, he said, “turn triplets into twins.” Such sophistry! Aborting one sibling triplet doesn’t magically transform the surviving babies into twins. It means they are triplets and one sibling is dead. How must that feel? There but for the location of the forceps go I.