Aborted from the mind

I recently read a NYT article about elective twin-reduction abortions (first through the Mere Comments blog, and then through the recommendation of a friend). It is so sad :( Basically, these women discover they're having twins and decide that they can't handle it - they don't have the time, or money, or emotional capacity, etc. So they have one of the twins aborted, and carry the other one as a single pregnancy. Can you imagine what that surviving kid would think and feel if they ever found out?

Honestly, to me this sounds like the same old argument for abortion. Why should we make a pregnant, unmarried teen carry her baby when she doesn't have the money to raise him, or the time to care for him and still make it through school or find a job, or the maturity and life experience to know what to do? So we feel sympathy for her (which is right and good) and allow her to have an abortion (which is not right or good).

The degree to which we as a society approve of abortion goes up as we feel pity for the mother's plight and goes down as we lose that pity. This was noticeable in the NYT's comments on the article above. Those who felt that raising twins was horribly difficult and not worth the fatigue and labor and inconvenience it brought to the mother's life were much more in favor of twin-reduction abortions (and they tried to make it sound morally acceptable by talking about how much more love and attention the mother would be able to give to the remaining child, as if love came in fixed quantities - oops, I gave my first child 100% of my mother-love, so now if I have a second one I'll have to love the first one less! - which is false). Others, who noticed that most mothers opting for this procedure were on the wealthy side, felt that the choice was purely selfish and unnecessary, and thus had far less pity and far less approval.

But none of the commenters (at least none of the many I read) judged it by an objective moral standard. It seemed to come down to whether or not they could justify it somehow, and "feel comfortable" with the procedure. None of them clearly said that the other twin - the one who was killed - was just as much a person as the second. The only difference was that the mother only wanted one child, not two. She had a picture in her mind of a single beautiful baby, and the presence of a second one overwhelmed her and clashed with her desires. Patrick Henry Reardon had it right when he said that "children are now being aborted in the flesh, because they have already been, in large measure, aborted from the mind" - that our culture "has largely stopped thinking of children as gifts from God."

If children are gifts from God, then we have no right to kill them. If they are our own creation, intended to satisfy our own desires, merely "potential" human beings as long as they are still dependent in the womb, then there should be no problem. Why it is any more or less morally reprehensible to abort a single pregnancy than to abort one of twins?