Posted on 09/12/2011 4:22:41 PM PDT by wagglebee
If they feel empowered to do this, how far behind can mandatory termination be?
Unfortunately IIRC the test for this syndrome is only about 60% reliable and has many false positives.
They just do not have the strength, or the heart, to do that. And I cannot condemn them for this.
Admittedly, strength and heart are rare gifts.
That said, what is a 'normal' child -- one that has average IQ, or higher?
Defeat Obamacare.
Save the babies....I now have two Down Syndrome grandchildren, one naturally born to my son and daughter in law, the other one adopted from the Ukraine.
the blood test and ultrasound picks up a bunch of stuff, including things that can be treated to save the baby’s life.
(e.g. we lost a kid with a huge congenital diaphragmatic hernia because mom didn’t receive prenatal care until 32 weeks. If we had diagnosed it earlier we could have offered in utero surgery, but since it was picked up late, it meant the lungs didn’t develop enough to keep the kid alive even though we did surgery right away.
Another case, of course, is Senator Santorum’s baby Gabriel, with a kidney problem. They fixed it in utero but it got infected so she went into labor and lost the kid).
The bad news is that we docs have to offer it to families or risk being sued.
When my daughter was born was born they told us she had Downs Syndrome. Two weeks later they came back and said, oops, it’s just Cystic Hygroma. If they can’t accurately diagnose with the baby in their hands, I don’t know how anyone trusts the ultrasound diagnostics....
This is what the Nazis did. And things snowballed and a lot of people were exterminated due to governmental regulations. Rule by administrative fiat is our death.
Almost no child is born without something that could be called a ‘defect’, and this is where true, life or death morality enters the picture.
To illustrate this, here are two extreme examples. But there is a caution that the vast majority of ‘defects’ fit between the two in severity.
First is a cleft palate. It is regarded as one of the easiest ‘defects’ to surgically treat. The surgery is inexpensive, and the quality of life of a child with a surgically closed palate is tremendously better than a child forced to endure a cleft palate. And the sole long-term effect of the surgery is a small scar on the upper lip.
Yet there are many parents in Europe who will choose to abort a fetus over such a petty thing. Truly a failure of their morality, to kill their child over such a petty thing, and a shame upon a doctor who would countenance it.
As the opposite extreme are children who are born extremely prematurely, so much so that their internal organs have not developed, nor can continue to develop outside the womb. They are almost, to a fraction of a percent, condemned to death. But there is a “heroic” surgery, involving the transplant of all of their internal abdominal organs: heart, lungs, digestive tract, etc. And the child, even if it survives, will be severely crippled, retarded, and cost hundreds of thousands more to keep them alive for a short life.
This surgery is extremely expensive, now perhaps over $2m, and it almost never works. And it is a cruel irony.
None of the parents whose child needs this surgery can afford it, because the cause of such extremely premature birth is almost exclusively the lack of any prenatal care. Had the parents any guidance about how to tend a pregnancy, and followed it, their child would have likely fully developed.
The irony is that if the government just refused to pay $2m in a futile attempt to save the life of this infant, it could afford prenatal care for about 200 pregnant mothers. Ironic, because by *not* funding this surgery, the *need* for this surgery would be almost entirely precluded.
And this is the flip side of a moral failure. Because such parents beg and plead to save the life of their child, and people see this tragedy and their hearts are moved enough so that they petition the government to spend the money. Yet they do not know that to do so will create even more suffering.
As I said, these are two extremes. But each in their way illustrate the moral conundrum facing parents whose child they may or may not be able to support with their lives. A Down Syndrome child may be a godsend to parents with the strength and heart to raise them; but they may destroy parents who are not so gifted.
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