So was a friend of mine, with the same result. She was strongly counseled to have the child aborted, but just could not bring herself to do it. Not under any circumstances. Turns out that the test for Down's can give a false positive if they have the age of the baby off by a significant amount.
I wonder how many perfectly normal babies have been killed, and how many parents have been denied a child, because of this?
"I wonder how many perfectly normal babies have been killed, and how many parents have been denied a child, because of this?"
My wife and I went through exactly the same, almost 10 years ago. Quite a few medical offices are STRONGLY biased in favor of abortion for indications of Downs.
We had the same error in test results too, and I think a DELIBERATE mistake as to the date of pregnancy, which gives a false positive on AFP test. The doctors told us we were wrong about the date of pregnancy - they insisted we were wrong. And we knew for a fact that we were not.
We told 'em to stuff it - the extra tests, the attitude, and the business. We fired the doctor. We hired a midwife - had the baby at the Catholic hospital.
Those who comply and abort their child will never know the truth if the doctors were wrong. Shame on all of them.
My wife, before we were married, worked with a man who was about 40 years old, as was this man's wife. In the usual greedy liberal manner, they had refused to have children to this point because they were busy satisfying their material desires first. But now they were ready. So the wife gets pregnant, and after some months its time for the test and its positive for DS and they abort. Next they are 41, and the wife suffers 2 misscarriages in that year.
Final outcome? No children, and most likely they killed off what would have been a perfectly healthy child.
At least in this day and age, I don't think anybody is aborting pregnancies based just on the first-round test for Downs (nuchal scan). That's an unreliable test and is just used to identify whether there's a significant likelihood that the fetus has Downs. If the parents aren't going to abort for Downs anyway, then there's no reason to do the additional genetic testing to confirm it (though some parents do anyway, just because they want to know and maybe tell relatives in advance). The confirming tests, chorionic villi sampling and amniocentesis, carry some risk, but very small. Any doctor who advised a patient to abort based on a nuchal scan alone, would be betting their career on the accuracy of that notoriously inaccurate test, because if the aborted fetus turned out not to have Downs, the malpractice suit would be so open-and-shut that the insurer wouldn't even bother trying to defend it -- they'd just pay out several million and leave the doctor uninsurable for the rest of his life.