May 9th, 2007 at 7:36 am
HT: Drudge
The New York Times has a decent article focusing on the in utero diagnosis of Down’s Syndrome. The article cites a statistic from a 1999 UK study: after parents are told that their baby has Down’s, 92 percent opt for an abortion.
There is good news:
Convinced that more couples would choose to continue their pregnancies if they better appreciated what it meant to raise a child with Down syndrome, a growing group of parents are seeking to insert their own positive perspectives into a decision often dominated by daunting medical statistics and doctors who feel obligated to describe the difficulties of life with a disabled child.They are pressing obstetricians to send them couples who have been given a prenatal diagnosis and inviting prospective parents into their homes to meet their children. In Massachusetts, for example, volunteers in a “first call” network linking veteran parents to new ones are now offering support to couples deciding whether to continue a pregnancy.
The parent evangelists are driven by a deep-seated fear for their children’s well-being in a world where there are fewer people like them. But as prenatal tests become available for a range of other perceived genetic imperfections, they may also be heralding a broader cultural skirmish over where to draw the line between preventing disability and accepting human diversity.
Granted, the 90% UK statistic is alarming. It makes me question the type and amount of influence the Anglican church has in this debate.
We may not be at 90% yet here, but the apparent easy way out is so seductive. I don’t recommend that parents not be told what is going on with their child. Churches need to speak out against de facto eugenics. If a state can’t outlaw most abortions, it is going to be tough to enforce anti-abortion legislation that saves atypical children. It would make atypical kids more special than typical ones.
May 9th, 2007 at 10:33 am
That is why I get concerned when I hear about possible prenatal testing for autism spectrum [dis]orders. This opens the door wide for dehumanization.
May 9th, 2007 at 10:46 am
When my sister-in-law had the fetal alpha protein test at 17 weeks into her pregnancy, her numbers were off. The nurse at Kaiser Permanante (their HMO) was trying to schedule the abortion even before an ultrasound to determine what might be going on (the test has a 56% error rate. It is good at picking up a problem if there is one (spina bifida if there is too much protein, downs if there is too little) but it does give false positives more often than not).
It turned out they were off in dating the pregnancy by a week…and that is enough, frequently, to throw the test off, since they are measuring the protein levels at a particular level AT seventeen weeks. Since so many women are not watching for signs of fertility, think of how often that pregnancies are off!!!
May 9th, 2007 at 3:26 pm
Carol:
“Dehumanization”. Indeed. We need to think really really hard on the implications of what Carol is saying.
RPW:
If they’re not telling us the stats on the error rates, what else aren’t we being told?
May 10th, 2007 at 12:22 am
Choosing to have a child with severe mental and physical problems is a moral atrocity. There’s no way to get around the fact that Down syndrome causes suffering in everyone involved, especially the child. The parents who support bringing more people burdened with this illness into the world only want to extend their and their children’s suffering to everyone else. They should be named for what they are - evil.
Every child should be loved and valued - but a fetus is not a child until he or she is born - and what kind of monster do you have to be to want children to suffer their entire life? Only the religious dogma behind the hypocritical “culture of life” is capable of sinking people to this level.
May 10th, 2007 at 10:47 am
HeroicLife, I’ll spare you the religious arguments, even if they would be for your own good.
40 weeks is the normal gestational period for a human. Children are often born at 37 and 38 weeks with minimal complications. In your mind, consider a mom holding her baby that was born two weeks early, and beside her, picture a mom 38 weeks pregnant. Your argument seems to confer childhood as depending one which side of the cervix a baby happens to be on.
Denoting people who recognize the life in the womb and want it to be delivered as “evil” is flamebait. I hope others won’t indulge in personal invective.
Your first argument — that we should not deliver those whom we know would suffer, has several issues:
First, as RPW mentioned above, these prenatal tests can register false positives, in which case you’re killing someone who wouldn’t suffer.
Secondly, nobody is perfect. If suffering from an ailment is the criteria to kill someone, that opens the door to killing everyone when it’s convenient. Survival of the fittest only looks great if you’re at the top. Someone having a perceptibly poor quality of life does not disqualify that person from being alive.
Thirdly, people suffer from the same disorders in different ways. Suffering may not manifest itself as pain. There are various degrees of Down’s, autism, and other disorders. Some manage their disorder, and some overcome it. They wouldn’t have the chance to succeed if suddenly someone made an arbitrary decision that a child was not fit to be born. That would be the ultimate imposition of one’s morality.
I think you would benefit from visiting a Newborn Intensive Care Unit. Children born from 24 weeks forward finish their healing and go on to live their lives. Children that are legally terminable inside a uterus but a child inside an isolette. There is so much potential in these newest of life that we kill ourselves as a society when we deny them their right to live. Yes, some may have issues, but who is anyone to tell them they need to die so that their parents wouldn’t be inconvenienced?
May 10th, 2007 at 7:23 pm
My husband and I were faced with this ten years ago when I was 38 and my 3rd child was born. When I was 4 1/2 months my doctor did an AFP (Alpha Feta Protein) test, which is a prenatal screening test for down syndrome and spina bifida. At the time I didn’t know what the test was and I trusted that the doctor had a purpose for wanting it, so I didn’t protest. If I had known then what I know now, I would not have had the AFP.
Medical professionals believe they are doing parents a”favor” in administration of prenatal diagnostic tests. My belief is that they are 100% unnecessary, but insurance companies will pay for them, so why not push them… As a matter of fact, I also had 4 ultrasounds throughout the pregnancy.
So - what is the purpose of the AFP and any other kind of “diagnostic” prenatal test? It is only to determine whether the unborn child is defective in order to give parents who think like HeroicLife above, the opportunity to dispose of their unborn children.
Well ~ my AFP test did come back positive for down syndrome. So the doc called me and asked me to come in for a second one just to confirm it. After the second one came back positive the doc called me to let me know there was a 95% chance that our baby would be born with down syndrome. I was scared half to death! Needless to say, my husband and I spent the next few weeks crying ourselves to sleep at night. We were not given any materials about down syndrome ~ nothing. But the doc did refer us to a genetic specialist in Sioux Falls. I didn’t understand why he was making the referal though. It was yet another attempt to confirm the diagnosis in order to give us “options”, as they said.
So we went to Sioux Falls not knowing what to expect and not knowing why we were seeing a genetic specialist. But they did another ultrasound there to look at the baby’s heart and bones. Babies with down syndrome usually have heart defects. Some of their bones are also shorter than normal and the skin on the back of their necks are thicker than normal, thus the “flat” look on the back of the head. Their tongues are thicker and their eyes are set differently.
During this ultrasound my husband was waiting outside the exam room. I had three docs in there measuring and talking while they looked at the ultrasound. They asked if they could make our case part of a study they were conducting on babies born with down syndrome to older moms. That was the least of my worries. As I watched the monitor I could see that the baby was a little boy but I never told my husband because it didn’t really matter. All I was worried about was his health. We wanted this child and we had gone through a lot to get him.
When the ultrasound was finished we met with the doc in his office and he told us that there was no way he could say for certain whether or not the baby had down syndrome. But the AFP was reliable enough that he agreed that there was a strong chance. Then he dropped the bomb. He said, “we can do further tests, or we can terminate the pregnancy”. I was HORRIFIED that he would offer us the opportunity to “terminate”. Terminate ~ it sounds like something you’d matter-of-factly do with a computer program. I told the doctor that termination was no an option for us, that we wanted the baby no matter what his health problems might be. Then the doc suggested amniocentisis. We also refused that and left in shock. I cried most of the way home.
On the way home I noticed some graffiti scrawled on the interstate overpass. It said “trust Jesus” ~ that’s all. And I realized that maybe I was not fully trusting that God’s plan is perfect, because I was so afraid of the unknown. But isn’t that what faith is? Trusting that God’s plan is perfect no matter what it might be? In the mean time I continued to cry sporatically and I felt guilty as if God were “punishing” me ~ I call it ‘having a Baptist moment’. After that day I had many Baptist moments blaming myself, feeling punished by God, and feeling guilty because this would probably be the only child my husband and I would ever have and there was a very good chance that he was going to be very sick, disabled, and may even die.
I continued to pray, and I prayed without ceasing…. that God would give me the strength to do this. When I was in my seventh month I began experiencing peace about it all and I knew that whatever happened, we’d be okay. And I have to say that I forgot about it. My husband did not though. But he’s a very quiet man and didn’t share his fears with me ~ he probably didn’t want me to worry about his being worried…..
Our baby was born in the spring of 1997 in the middle of a huge South Dakota blizzard. I loved him before he was born and even more the first time I layed eyes on him. He was a beautiful little creature of God’s ~ a precious soul. And I didn’t think about down syndrome ~ it was the farthest thing from my mind. Then the doc said, “he doesn’t have down syndrome”.
We would love him just the same if he had been sick because he was the gift God had chosen to give us.
My point is this: How many misdiagnosed babies have been needlessly murdered for the selfishness of their parents? Because selfishness is exactly the only reason people choose to destroy their unborn children. Whether it’s abortion or to save themselves from the fear that lack of understanding down syndrome causes. It is selfish. And to say that it is in order to preserve “quality of life” is an even greater sin. For who can define what a quality life is? And who has the authority over another helpless human being to decide whether or not that person’s life is worth living. No one ~ only God alone for he is the creator of all life and life is a precious gift. I could go on and on and on, but I won’t. I just wanted to share my story.
I am thankful for a healthy child, but would have loved him just the same if he were not. We could say that the quality of another’s life is unfitting compared to our own, based soley on our own twisted definition of what “quality” is ~ does that give one person the right to end another’s life? What makes us humans think we can get away with ending a life He has chosen to begin?
May 12th, 2007 at 10:53 pm
HeroicLife,
I understand your argument, but I’m not buying it. You are basing your argument on the concept that a child is not a child until after birth.
However, many children are taken from the mother pre-birth for a variety of medical reasons and they survive and grow healthy.
So the decision to end a pregnancy early, versus removing the baby premature, is an arbitrary standard based on nothing more than how a person feels at the time the decision is made.
The hypocrisy here is not coming from our “culture of life”, it is coming from your arbitrary “culture of death” standard for determining when a baby may or may not survive past birth.
May 12th, 2007 at 10:56 pm
Furthermore,
It is not Heroic to take the easy way out. Abortion is just that, the easy way out for people too immature and too scared to take adult responsibility for being a parent.