On Channel 4 News tonight there was a very startling article on the screening of foetus' suspected of having Downs Syndrome. New research has claimed that,
"For every three unborn Down's syndrome babies prevented from being born, two healthy babies will be miscarried because of the methods used to detect the condition.The research claims that, in detecting and preventing the birth of 660 Down's babies, 400 healthy foetuses are lost."
Abortion is a very emotive issue, but these statistics don't make comfortable reading. It would be interesting the know the responses of the GP's in our own congregation to this medical journal report.
2 comments:
It's difficult to comment adequately without in fact seeing the precise detail of the original research paper on which this is based.
My understanding of the process was that the blood testing is offered to women at around 4 months of pregnancy and this only gives an indication of the degree of 'risk' of Down's Syndrome: high, medium, or low, as a representation of the '1 in x number' (eg. 1 in 150) risk of DS. Risk is a function of the blood measures taken, but also of the age of the mother - rising age above 35 dramatically increases the risk of DS. If 'High Risk' the woman is then offered an invasive test which involves using a needle guided by ultrasound to sample some of the fluid around the baby. This has cells which come from the baby, and can determine the exact genetic make up of the babe. The danger to the pregnancy of this second procedure is around 2-4% mortality to the baby from the sampling procedure itself, dependent on the expertise of the sampler. This risk is minimised nowadays by having one person do all the tests for a region,so they develop the expertise to lower the risk.
The irony is that nowadays, in a slightly contrary to commonsense fact, the high proportion of people born with DS are to young mothers, who because of their age tend to fall into the 'low risk' group on blood test result interpretation.
The statistics which underly this article must be around what fraction of the babies in the high risk blood group actually have DS - if it is very high, then the majority of the tragically lost babies from the invasive procedure will have DS, if it has a low predictive value, then a higher proportion of the babies will never have had DS but will be among the 2-4% who die from the sampling procedure.
However, the bigger issue for us as Christians must be the purpose of this whole testing scenario - to determine if the child has DS - with a subtext of Termination of Pregnancy for those shown to have DS. Ok, some of those shown to have DS will lead to parents knowing about the DS and coming to terms with it prior to the birth of their baby. However, the reality is that this is unusual, the vast majority of babies found to have DS are I understand aborted. And this leads us to consider what the State and society deems as reasonable, the killing/aborting of babies simply and only because they have a disability which society finds increasingly unacceptable, but which doesn't necessarily adveresly affect their own experience of their lives - many (?most, ?all) people who are permitted to live with DS do not find it to be an unacceptable condition to live with. The morality of this is diifficult to understand, and for God who created that life we can only wonder at His response to our wish to destroy it.
Philip
I am greatly saddened by these statistics but, in my view, the medical research community has hidden too readily behind the research of just a couple of groups in the UK. I worked for one of the teams and then resigned my research career in 1988 for precisely this reason - the fetal loss ratio for the proposed new method of screening for Down Syndrome babies was unacceptable.
In the decade before that we had always adopted a fetal loss ratio of at least 10:1 ie any programme that we established had to deliver at least 10 spina bifida babies for one normal fetus. In practice the screening programme did much better. However, when the team began to move to screen for Downs syndrome a 'different set of rules' was used which meant that the biochemical method developed to screen for Downs syndrome looked much better.
The usual method of screening for Downs syndrome ie just relying upon offering amniocentesis to women over age 37 or so would be expected to have a fetal loss ratio of close to 100:1. That research is now showing the more recently introduced methods to yield a fetal loss ratio nearer 3:2 is in my view shocking.
Is our runaway culture so keen to terminate Downs syndrome babies that we are willing to terminate nearly as many normal babies? Apparently it is, but I hope this research will help start to turn things around.
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