The New York Times recently ran an article called The Two-Minus-One
Pregnancy, about pregnant women who, discovering that they are carrying
twins, choose to have one of their unborns aborted. The reason given is nearly
always that one makes a better parent if one must parent fewer children. This
bureaucratic approach to motherhood has already received comment at
LiveAction.org; what I'd like to add is that the trend provides additional
evidence that we human beings, made by God to be "only a little lower than
the heavenly beings" [Psalms 8:5], increasingly behave more like animals.
Many species of bird, especially birds of prey, lay two eggs each mating
season; the chick that hatches first will take advantage of its greater size to
dominate its sibling, attacking it repeatedly and ensuring its weakness by
monopolizing the food brought by the pair's elders. The younger one almost
inevitably dies as a consequence of this bullying, but its demise is cruelly
logical in our fallen world, for the parents are unable to feed more than one
offspring; zoologists tell us that the birds' laying two eggs rather than one
makes for an avian insurance policy, since, if something should befall one egg,
there will be another to keep alive the dream of successful reproduction.
The birds, of course, have the excuse that
they are only brutes acting from instinct; what excuse do we have?
