> I've thought about situations like this. I don't think it is proper to label her as "right" or "wrong" in this situation. When you're playing with odds upon which people's lives depend, how CAN you make a proper judgment? If it was known for sure that all the babies would die, you'd have to choose to abort some to save the rest. If it was known for sure that they would all survive, you'd have to choose to have them all. But it was not known ahead of time, nor was there enough certainty that any possible outcome would be considered an unexpected turn of events. The decision was between her and God, and she had to make that decision in whatever way was most bearable to her conscience.
>
> Those who are calling her "wrong" (or "stupid") are judging too harshly, and doing so from a state of emotional comfort that is absolutely ignorant of the great complexity of distress that is bound to have plagued her. ("Not the decision I would have made" is obviously an ok response. It's also one I dare not make on my own, though, because I don't know that I could predict how I would feel in such a situation, and I'd be trusting in God to lead me one way or the other, and I wouldn't know that until it happened.)
>
> My heart breaks for her.

My initial impulse was to vote "wrong", but after consideration, I'm going to have to go with Sam.

There's a difference between making a cold-blooded choice to take life or not to take life and making an uncertain choice based on the *risk* of taking life. I said before that any question about sacrificing one life to save another is iffy to me; the situation has to be pretty clear-cut before I'd give an unqualified "yes, I'd kill someone" (as in, shoot the murderer now or he opens fire on the crowd).

If those babies had lived, most people would be calling her a heroine. Many people have become heroes in similar cases by taking risks that others would call "stupid", for whatever reasons; their own ethics, the call God puts on their heart, whatever. It's not our business why.

So who knows? It's all in God's hands, ultimately. I won't presume to judge here.

But I'd like to echo Sam; hearing about tragedies like this breaks my heart. Speaking from firsthand experience, I've learned that abstractions and arguments mean little to a grieving parent, and all I can say is that whatever your opinion is, this woman deserves our sympathy, not our judgment or even our analysis.

Ar"hoping not to sound like a copycat"thur