From an article in yesterday's New York Times about fertility clinics that produce too many children:
"One woman, a nurse who could afford only one try at in vitro, pressured Dr. Chiu to transfer eight embryos. 'I said under one condition,' Dr. Chiu remembered. 'I made her sign an agreement that she would do selective reduction.' That agreement, to remove some of the embryos if they lived, was very likely unenforceable."
You think? A personal service contract requiring abortion?
Having said that, I am generally interested in the idea of restraints that are not necessarily enforceable, though my thoughts range to bylaws passed by the shareholders restricting the the board of a Delaware corporation rather than to fertility policy. Still, what was the doctor thinking? Even if one were okay with the idea of such a contract, can you imagine trying to enforce it?
EDIT: I wonder if such a contract has ever made it to court.
2/12/2009
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The interesting thing is that I bet that lots of the women who use fertility clinics, and do use "selective reduction," do not think of it as getting an abortion (after all, they're not trying to end their pregnancy). Once you've shifted the reproductive process to a bunch of petri dishes, I expect it would be easy to think of all those implanted embryos -- 7 of which, in the case of the nurse, died on their own without being removed -- as not quite part of a pregnancy. Certainly selective reduction must be fairly widespread, or else we'd be hearing about a lot more litters being born.
I assume the point of the agreement was to impress upon the woman the seriousness of what she was doing, and also to try to clear the doctor of liability if her overburdened uterus popped because she didn't abide by the agreement. "It's not my fault, she agreed to remove some of the excess embryos and then welshed!"
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