Opinion: In today’s pages: octuplets, the pope and Al Arabiya
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The Opinion Manufacturing Division offers two very different views on the birth of octuplets in Bellflower. Author William H. Woodwell Jr., citing the troubles his family experienced with twin daughters born 16 weeks early, throws a glass of cold water on the celebratory coverage of the Bellflower babies. Extremely premature births impose tremendous costs, Woodwell argues, and often lead to less than fully functional children. That’s why he calls for a crackdown on fertility treatments and -- here’s the ugly part -- culling some of the multiple fetuses they sometimes create:
Fertility doctors must be held more accountable for their actions. The medically assisted birth of triplets or higher should be viewed as the equivalent of malpractice. In addition, when fertility treatments yield triplets or more, we need to promote responsible decision-making on the part of parents -- chiefly, by encouraging or even somehow requiring them to engage in multifetal reduction.
Sorry, but that sounds too much like China’s brutal one-child policy to me. (Remember, irate letter writers, that Op-Ed writers do not express the Views of This Newspaper.) On the other side of the spread, the editorial board takes a much more equanimious approach to the event. It notes the great challenges that the births pose to the family, yet it doesn’t assume the worst:
People might cluck, but then people are always ready to cluck at the parenting decisions of others. We’re more inclined, as a society, to define and foresee problems in eccentricity than to think that perhaps it will turn out to be simply extraordinary.
Elsewhere in the editorial stack, the board blasts Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) for trying to make President Obama’s choice for attorney general, Eric Holder, promise not to prosecute a set of potential defendants (U.S. intelligence officers who used ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’) before he’s confirmed. And it praises President Obama for starting his efforts in the Middle East on the right note, giving his first official television interview as president to the Saudi-owned satellite news channel Al Arabiya. Hmm. I wonder if Obama’s appearance drew more viewers than Al Jazeera did when it aired its last Osama bin Laden tape.
Back in Op-Ed land, freelance writer Lee Gapay offers a rare bit of unadulterated good news: He’s finally found space in a subsidized housing project for seniors after 6 1/2 years spent living in his pickup truck. (You may remember Gapay from his last piece about being homeless, which ran on Thanksgiving Day.) And columnist Tim Rutten writes that the decision by Pope Benedict XVI to rescind the excommunications of four anti-Semitic bishops in a traditionalist Catholic sect wasn’t merely an inside-the-Vatican issue, but also a blow to religious liberty and tolerance.