What should have been a sweet “human interest” story about a woman who naturally conceived quintuplets—that’s five babies at once—has a sinister, disturbing edge because of what she was urged by family, friends, and healthcare professionals to do: “reduce” the number of babies for her own health and that of the surviving babies.
According to reports, Theresa Troia of El Paso, Texas—a quadruplet herself—naturally conceived quintuplets, a very rare event (1 in 55 million natural pregnancies). Obviously, carrying so many babies at once comes with a high risk to both the mother and all of the babies. Because of this risk, she says, “I got a lot of comments that I should think about reducing. The risks of actually having them all… even my provider didn’t agree with keeping five. They dropped me.”
Yes, she claims she was dropped by her doctor because she wouldn’t abort some of her children! In other words, in order to lower the risk, she was supposed to pick and choose which babies lived and which babies died. But neither she nor the doctors are God—they do not have the authority to decide who lives and who dies. It is our all-knowing God who writes the number of our days.
Finally, Troia found a doctor who was willing to support her decision to keep all of her children (he says he believes his job is to support the patient and that “God has a place in what happens”). With a C-section at 28-weeks gestation, three little girls and two little boys arrived. They were safely placed in the NICU, and now three of them have come home, with the final two preparing to join them soon.
I wonder how her family and friends—and those doctors—feel now, looking at five healthy, thriving little newborns when before they wanted to kill some of them. Would they walk through the NICU and say, “Oh, you should have killed little Isabella,” or “Too bad Jaxon is still here, he should have been ‘reduced’ months ago”? Very likely, they would not!
They probably understand the value of these lives now that the children are born. . . but these babies are exactly the same people now, outside the womb, as they were a few months ago inside the womb. They didn’t magically become people when they were pulled from Troia’s womb and placed in an incubator. They have been people, made in God’s image, from the very moment of fertilization. And I’m thankful their mother fought to protect their precious lives. From fertilization onward, we have no right to deliberately take the life of a child in the womb!
