107 1/2 Washington Street

Stories like this one in the New York Times (registration required) leave me at a loss for words. It's the story of a woman who found herself pregnant with triplets, and decided that two of the three must be destroyed. ("Selective reduction" is the clinical term the pro-abortion crowd uses to disguise what's really going on.)

And why did she have two of her three children destroyed? Because it might affect her lifestyle.

My immediate response was, I cannot have triplets. I was not married; I lived in a five-story walk-up in the East Village; I worked freelance; and I would have to go on bed rest in March. I lecture at colleges, and my biggest months are March and April. I would have to give up my main income for the rest of the year. There was a part of me that was sure I could work around that. But it was a matter of, Do I want to?

. . . now I'm going to have to move to Staten Island. I'll never leave my house because I'll have to care for these children. I'll have to start shopping only at Costco and buying big jars of mayonnaise. Even in my moments of thinking about having three, I don't think that deep down I was ever considering it.

In Huxley's Brave New World, motherhood is considered a low, vulgar thing. Huxley was quite the prognosticator.

And I have to ask: what purpose did this story serve? Why did the New York Times print it? I can't quite figure that one out.