The Two-Minus-One Pregnancy Summary

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Abortion Choices: Reproductive Science and Ethical Dilemmas Ruth Padawer’s article “The Two-Minus-One Pregnancy” retells the stories of a number of different couples and physicians who have had to deal with difficult reproductive choices that were in a way the result of advances in medical science. Both doctors and couples are being asked to in a sense to “play god” in determining when it is appropriate to abort a fetus. Padawer relates the stories of a number of physicians and couples who deal in different ways with the difficult decisions surrounding abortion especially as it relates to reducing a pregnancy from twins to a singleton. She shows how the advances in medical science are forcing both parents and physicians to make ethical decisions…show more content…
Both seem to be making a conscious decision about right and wrong and a practical decision about the impact of a baby on their lives. Each of the couples and the doctors were faced with conflicts on multiple levels involving both individual psychological needs and differences of values. These conflicts required resolutions that were interpersonal (ethical decisions for both parents and physicians), intrapersonal (between the parents themselves) and intergroup (between parents and the medical communities that served them). The causes of the conflict in the stories were values of the people. They believed that abortions were okay even though they knew they were being put in situations in which there was a possibility of them having multiple fetuses. The way the parents in the stories dealt with their conflict were by the style of problem solving. The parents felt by eliminating the baby, they would be eliminating any future problems. The topic of abortions is very controversial, some people believe they are acceptable while others think it is purely evil and wrong. I am on the fence about abortions. There are some situations in which I can understand the person aborting the baby but I don’t feel people who are knowingly trying should then decide to abort some babies because they only want

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