In West Africa’s pre-colonial period, the Igbo people believed twins were a bad omen. Single births were considered “human,” but multiple births belonged to the realm of animals. When a mother delivered two healthy babies instead of one, the parents would leave one newborn to die in the ojoo ofia (“bad bush”) outside the town, or simply suffocate one.
During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Christian Europeans so lamented these barbaric twin killings that it became one of the great mission causes of the time. Every Christian denomination sent missionaries there until the late 1930s, including the famous Mary Slessor of Calabar. Eventually, the twin killings stopped.
But the practice is back — in America.
Ruth Padawer in the New York Times chronicles the surge of twin killings (or “reductions,” to use the clinical language of the abortion industry). Modern fertility treatments have created so many multi-infant pregnancies that the demand for abortions in high-risk situations has skyrocketed. As a result, women — who appear desperate to have children but to have those children completely on their own terms — are increasingly killing one baby in utero even if they are only carrying twins. Far from being deemed necessary for the health of the mother, these “twin reductions” are being performed for pure personal convenience.
Read the whole thing here — and find out how even doctors who perform abortions are troubled by this new trend, how doctors are telling their patients not to reveal that they’ve “reduced” their twin pregnancies, and much more.
But you might want to sit down first.