Wednesday, October 05, 2005
Why Do We Accept This?
Here's a story about the possible separation of some conjoined twins.
The generally accepted wisdom is that even though one of the twins often dies, separation is preferable if at all possible. Interestingly, I could not find any statistics on single twin mortality in separation procedures. Everything I found talked around it, "75% survival of at least one twin" was the best statistic I saw. My presumption is one twin dies most of the time. The logic is that the surviving twin will have a better life and live longer than the two would conjoined. But I just cannot see it as that clear-cut a matter.
How is this really different than selective harvesting (read abortion) in IVF? If indeed most separation procedures effectively dooms one of the twins, shouldn't we at least wait until the twins are old enough to make this decision on their own?
I don't have any answers here, I am just pointing out that the conventional wisdom probably shouldn't be.
The generally accepted wisdom is that even though one of the twins often dies, separation is preferable if at all possible. Interestingly, I could not find any statistics on single twin mortality in separation procedures. Everything I found talked around it, "75% survival of at least one twin" was the best statistic I saw. My presumption is one twin dies most of the time. The logic is that the surviving twin will have a better life and live longer than the two would conjoined. But I just cannot see it as that clear-cut a matter.
How is this really different than selective harvesting (read abortion) in IVF? If indeed most separation procedures effectively dooms one of the twins, shouldn't we at least wait until the twins are old enough to make this decision on their own?
I don't have any answers here, I am just pointing out that the conventional wisdom probably shouldn't be.
