“Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” That’s the refrain in the Book of Judges, when the Israelites had forgotten that God is their king. It could as well be a sentence summing up contemporary American life.

The New York Times Magazine yesterday presented a new example of such thinking. Ruth Padawer’s “The Two-Minus-One Pregnancy” examines the abortion of a healthy twin when mothers decide they’d rather have only one child.