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10 August 2007

Risk of miscarriage

I'm reading a journal article about testing for Down's Syndrome. They ask pregnant women about what aspects of the test is most important. The effectiveness of the test is one attribute and another is the risk of miscarriage. Except the risk of miscarriage is defined as "the percentage risk of miscarrying a pregnancy unaffected by Down's Syndrome" as a result of the test. This implies that carrying a baby with Down's Syndrome to full-term is of such little value to mothers that the authors believe it's more accurate to exclude them entirely from the decision. They've effectively rounded the value of those babies to zero.

Comments

  1. Angry!!!!

    emily / 4:42pm / 10 August 2007

  2. Yeah. I was really surprised when I read it. The implied assumption that any parent would want to abort makes me sadder and angrier than the individual parents who do.

    Ryan / 4:46pm / 10 August 2007

  3. There is so much joy in a down syndrome person. It still amazes me that people can not see that.

    gem / 9:20pm / 12 August 2007

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