Prenatal Screening

I'm now working in Obstetrics and Gynecology, and I'm finding that many profound moral dilemmas (for the rest of the world) are quite mundane and trivial everyday activities. One such issue is prenatal screening.

The rest of the world is quite divided on the issue of screening pregnant women for "defective" babies. Polls show roughly fifty-fifty, I'm told. But routinely, and in Canada, by law, women must be offered access to state-of-the-art tools that will detect the presence of "defects" such as Down Syndrome in the preborn baby. While there is some rhetoric about simply "presenting women with information and leaving them with the choice" the reality in 80% of the cases is that the babies who are discovered to have defects are "terminated".

It is interesting to hear the experts themselves in this area. Their surveys find that 80% of physicians also say that they would terminate if faced with the same defects in their own pregnancy. Yet they do not connect this with why 80% of patients do the same. They only comment that "the issue makes for a good coffee table discussion" but when it becomes a personal reality, we are all under the same pressures to make the choice to abort.

It's quite a perplexing situation, but still quite a black and white issue: the majority of physicians recommend prenatal screening as a tool to eliminate disease and cut health care costs, etc. The rest of us are quite uncomfortable with (at least strongly divided on) the idea of prenatal screening as a society. Women are benignly being offered "information" that pressures them into aborting because, among many reasons, there is little in the way of support for parents of disabled children. Abortion seems a quick and painless fix. After all, you can just try again...