Introduction

Recently, I read the article “The Two-Minus-One Pregnancy” by Ruth Padawer and it stunned me from the inside out. This article was about women who had help with fertilization, became pregnant with more than one child, and chose only to keep one. There were stories upon stories about woman having to choose one baby over the other after going through so much trouble to actually get pregnant. I was very confused about how the government allowed this to happen and the abortion fight popped into my mind; women have the right to an abortion if they want it. Just thinking about choosing one baby over another just did not seem right to me so I read on. A few clinics did not feel comfortable doing a reduction to a twin pregnancy and even some doctors. While reading this article, my mind started to wonder and I asked other girls in my class if they felt the same as me, and they did. The biggest issues in the article were morals and feeling anger towards the mothers or doctors. There was a nurse in the article that said she did regular abortions, but choosing to keep and kill a baby did not seem morally, religiously, or sanely right. The article goes on about the pros and cons when reducing down to a singleton, but I could not fathom having to make a choice like that.

After everything I thought of after reading the article, I could not get the government out of my head; I did not understand how they would allow something so odd to take place. Reduction to a singleton is getting more and more popular nowadays and I think the government should take some type of action because women who go through hospitals to get pregnant shouldn’t be allowed to choose one over the other, it’s wrong. Rape is something that is brought up a lot when abortion is swarming people’s heads but like I said before, if someone has professional help getting pregnant, why would they reverse the help? This issue is significant to society in many ways; girls who learn about this option will think taking the easy way out is always better. Things happen for a reason in life, so when life gives you two babies instead of one, learn to love more.

Finally after debating with myself and girls in my class, I dropped the moral aspect of the reduction and focused back on the government. I connected five different ideas to this one idea: should the government be able to control population growth? This question is important because it affects every living human being and there are so many different ways of looking at the question. Population growth is something that the world needs to pay more attention to because our Earth is depleting faster than we think it is and who better to take control of a messy situation than the government. People idolize and look up to government officials and if they were more informed about population growth, they would put it out there since they are humans as well and it is affecting them. The trend I found while researching this topic is freedom. Americans love their freedom and other countries would die for it, but when can people let go of their stubbornness and listen to scientists or government officials about using less water or using birth control. Everything I found revolved around the word freedom and people do not want that jeopardized. The government has major control in a crisis, so if the population isn’t stabilized somehow, would we want to listen to them then, when everything is going wrong?