"The human uterus is designed to carry one fetus," a front-page New York Times article avers. Tell it to Rebecca.
The rest of the article is about as wrongheaded. It quotes the head of the women's health and fertility branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Maurizio Macaluso, as saying, "You can't convince a couple that having twins is a bad thing...That's a major communication problem." What a cautionary quotation about giving the government more power to interfere with individuals and their doctors. The government doctor in charge of fertility in America seems to think that twins are bad and that the government's only problem is that it is having trouble communicating that message to parents. Maybe it's not a communications problem but a problem with the substance of the message. In other words, if parents think twins are good but the government doctor thinks twins are bad, maybe it's the parents who are right and not the government doctor.
The article goes on to complain that twins have greater risks of "eye and ear impairments and learning disabilities," and reports, "The government estimates that caring for premature infants costs $26 billion a year, including $1 billion for IVF babies, expenses that eventually get passed through the system and on to businesses and consumers." This is just a dangerous line of reasoning. Instead of focusing on the cost of caring for the premature infants, why not focus on the wealth they generate as adults, prosperity that also eventually gets passed along to businesses and consumers? All sorts of populations have greater risks of all sorts of problems. Women have greater risks of breast cancer. Men have greater risks of prostate cancer. African-Americans have greater risks of sickle cell anemia. Rather than trying to prevent these varieties of people from being born, as the Times article or the government doctors it quotes seem to want to prevent twins from being born, we focus on trying to prevent, cure, or treat these diseases. Older Americans are also more prone to heart disease and to eye and ear impairments, but no one is suggesting death panels, at least not openly.
Doubtless I'm particularly sensitive on this front as a parent of twins, but the article seems to be a government effort, in partnership with a receptive press, to depict an entire segment of the population, twins, as somehow flawed and undesirable. If ObamaCare is going to mean more of this sort of thing, expect a vigorous and deserved backlash.
