• Wed, Jun 6 2012

Why I Decided To Have A Selective Reduction

selective reductionAt 42, Mia was described as being of “advanced maternal age” by her doctors. Unpartnered, she decided to become a single mother with an initial round of fertility drugs and insemination. But after two years of aggressive treatments, including IVF, sperm and egg donors, and $80,000, Mia found herself pregnant with more embryos than she could feasibly sustain — both physically and financially.

Prior to conception, Mia was on a fertility cocktail of six shots a day. But after four disappointing rounds of insemination with sperm donors, the pregnancy hopeful tried a different doctor who suggested egg donors as well. Determined to carry a child, she consented to four cycles of IVF with two different sets of sperm and egg donors. But after conceiving a single child, Mia suffered a devastating miscarriage at nine weeks.

She forged ahead with another cycle resulting in 11 embryos — none of which her doctor said appeared very promising. Upon transferring three embryos, Mia was told that this round was very much a last ditch effort given that the rest weren’t even up to freezing standards. She was informed that the one embryo was Grade A while the two others were Grade B.

A pregnancy test later revealed that she had successfully conceived. But at the ultrasound, Mia was sick to her stomach to learn that she was carrying triplets — a severe risk to her health, according to her doctors and OBGYN.

“I wanted to be ecstatic, but I was more depressed than ever,” the mother remembers. “I was 43 years old, 5″3 and a single parent. My OBGYN and fertility doctors all advised me for the sake of my health and the health of the babies to reduce. It was in all of our best interests to reduce to twins. I remember my OBGYN saying , ‘if you were 25, and 5 foot 10 with a husband to help, you should have all three of them no problem, but you’re not. You are high risk and looking at maybe getting to 28 weeks if you are lucky.’ ”

Given the advice by her medical team, Mia muses that a selective reduction really wasn’t her decision to make considering the safety of all the babies was in jeopardy. She had the ability to ensure that at least two of them had a stronger chance at living. Considering how far she had already traveled in her arduous journey to become pregnant, she remained fearful of losing yet another opportunity to carry a child to term. But being faced with reduction upon finally conceiving felt like “an absurd form of torture.”

“I am finally pregnant and having to decide about a reduction,” she recalls. “The thing I wanted the most in life came with the biggest price.”

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  • Cindy

    A hard choice to make but she did what was best for her and her children, she should be commended for her strength

  • Carrie T.

    What is wrong with this sentence? “Considering how far she had already traveled in her arduous journey to become pregnant, she remained fearful of loosing yet another opportunity to carry a child to term”

    • August

      Loosing should be losing.
      Do I get a cookie?

  • Eileen

    I was wondering – you’ve previously written an article (a good one, actually) complaining about the class issues that are part of the phrases “selective reduction” and “abortion,” in which you argue that the term “selective reduction” should be replaced with “abortion” because they’re the same thing. So why do you continue to use the other phrase?

    • Koa Beck

      Hi Eileen. Thanks for reading. As you said, I personally don’t like the divisions implicit in “selective reduction” vs. “abortion,” but when reporting on another woman’s story, I stick to her terminology out of respect for her experience.

  • mommy munster

    she should not be judged. this was a case where her and the babies health/lives were in danger. i don’t like the whole ‘reduction’ idea but in this case, cut mia some slack! she is a single,middle-aged mom.

  • Xia

    This story is so sad. If she was a single woman who wished to have children later in life but did not have the financial stability to raise higher number multiples (which are often conceived with fertility help), she should have either adopted or had less fertilized eggs implanted during the procedure. If you are truly ready to be a parent, you are supposed to think about what is best for all of your children right from the beginning, the time to be selfish and think only about what is better/easier for you financially is over. Of course she cried and of course the procedure was “brutally awful and disgusting”; on some level she felt what she was doing was wrong. How can you conceive a child *on purpose* and then “terminate” it because you changed your mind about how convenient it is? She will be thinking about that 3rd child for the rest of her life and lying to her whole family for the rest of her life, too. Such a shame.

    • Cara

      Agreed, Xia. I completely agree with you.

    • Kelly

      Agreed.

    • gigi4747

      Great post.

  • Lilac

    Wow what a selfish woman! I can see wanting to put your career first but bringing a child into this world as an older mom, no dad and no given support system is selfish as well as dangerous to the health of the child. There have been studies proving correlation between parents (mom and dad) age and mental defects born in a child. Instead of going through all this why didn’t she just adopt if she wanted a child so badly?
    I pity her child. My mother had me late in life at 35 and I clearly remember as a child not being able to run around and play because my older parents just couldn’t keep up with me. I missed out because they were getting old and slow. And the writer is 42? Selfish selfish woman.

  • Christian

    I dont understand the thought process…..IMO you are already playing God when you do IVF and other Fert. treatments so why would she care to tell her parents about her aborting the triplet? — AND after spending $$$ using $$$ to determine the outcome…. to each his own……

  • thebadlydrawnfox

    I just want to offer Mia my sincerest congratulations on the birth of her daughters.

    To those who argue that she should not have gone ahead with the fertility treatment if she was not able to keep triplets, that she should perhaps have adopted instead, you completely fail to empathise with the position Mia – and others like her – are in. Adoption is not a simple and easy alternative to pregnancy in any way. Neither is choosing not to have the children you so sorely want.

    I think some of you are forgetting that she had been told that the chances of losing all three of her children were high. She acted to save her children, not merely out of ‘inconvenience’. And even were her choice motivated by only financial reasons, it would not have been simply a matter of convenience: I assume you have never lacked the money to feed your children? Because if you had, I doubt you’d regard such matters so lightly.

    Mia, you made a brave decision, both in having the reduction and in sharing your story. I honestly hope you look at your daughters and are proud of yourself for making the choice that allows them to be alive today.

    • Dennis

      I would like to point out that she somehow came up with $80,000 to become pregnant. The financial stability argument is not very strong here.

  • Ugh

    This all sounds like something out of a scary science fiction movie. Mix up babies in a lab! grade them by quality. Implant several! Human becomes pregnant with litter of babies! Faced with sickly multiples or selectively taking some back out! Embryo B, you’re outta here! What is this, a card game?

    I’m pro-choice, but this whole business of playing around with future people, doing whatever it takes so that people can get a baby, seems pretty awful.

  • Amanda

    It’s extremely hard to understand selective reduction for so many reasons. When my husband and I started IVF because of a male factor, I vowed that I would never, nor could ever go through selective reduction should we end up with a multiple pregnancy. On our first try I became pregnant with Fraternal Identicals. Two embryos transferred, both took, and both split. At 37 years old, 5’1″ and 110 lbs, the odds were not in our favor, not to mention the high risk of a quadruple pregnancy in all aspects. Now we were faced with having to reduce one set of twins, and my tune changed after extensive research and meditation. It’s an extremely difficult decision to make, and is not to be taken lightheartedly. Unless you yourself have gone through the emotions of years of infertility and everything that comes with it, to FINALLY getting pregnant and then have to first of all choose whether to risk every fetus, then your own self, then your support system after they are born (because you can’t do it alone, and with especially with high order multiples they will likely have health problems from the inevitable early birth), then finally your financial abilities (think about how much it cost to raise each child from birth until they are adults, and to put them through school)… you can’t possibly know to its true extent. I didn’t know until it happened to me. That being said, we reduced and now have amazing, healthy identical boys. It was a brutal journey, but I know my husband and I made the right decision in the end. I will always fantasize about the other set of twins and what it would be like to have all four, but my fantasies and realities are two different things. Just like Mia’s.