Pro-life advocates are in uproar about a disturbing issue, the surprising amount of prenatal tests that result in false positives for genetic disorders.
The New York Times published analytics which show that prenatal genetic screenings can be wrong up to 85% of the time. This becomes even more distressing when considering the emotional damage a woman can go through when told her baby will be disabled and she has an abortion, only to find out later that her baby would have been perfectly well, if given a chance to live.
The New York Times analysis focused on rare diseases, such as DiGeorge and Angelman syndromes. However, the data also shows a huge amount of error in false positives in low risk woman for a child with Down Syndrome. Dr. Diana Bianchi, the National Institutes of Health researcher quoted by the newspaper, published a peer-reviewed study in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2014, says that for every ten woman told they will have a child with Down Syndrome, five of those pre natal tests are wrong.
These false positive tests are a part of a larger problem in the healthcare industry. Organizations such as Planned Parenthood have tried to bury this information and oppose legislation to correct this problem. The root of this desire to weed out “defective” children can be found in the words of Planned Parenthood’s founder, Margaret Sanger, who once said, “defective stocks, those human weeds which threaten the blooming of the finest flowers of American civilization.” In her mind, these “defective stocks” included not only those with birth defects, but also children of certain races or national origin.
Allowing this type of medical error to continue in this country will have immense repercussions on the population and diversity of our country, and will allow the eugenicist values of Margaret Sanger to live on through Planned Parenthood and every abortion that organization performs.