“You know what is the sickest part of all? He was about 20 weeks along. We went through the whole child-birth process after the fact. And when he was born, if you wish to call it that, the doctor that delivered him said there were no visible signs of Down’s.”
There have been several stories posted here I have read of people being told their child had Down’s and they haven’t aborted it and the child didn’t have it. Conversely there have also been cases where they have, and they find out the child doesn’t have Down’s (like this couples).
I believe there have been problems with false positives with these tests.
The false positives are from preliminary tests — maternal blood tests and ultrasound — and at least in this country no doctor is going to suggest proceeding with an abortion on the basis of those alone. They can only indicate the probability of Downs, not confirm Downs. If a woman gets a high probability of Downs from the the preliminary tests, she would be advised that amniocentesis is needed to confirm if the fetus actually has Downs. If she declines the amniocentesis, on the grounds that she would try to carry the baby to term regardless of the amniocentesis results, then she has not been told that she is carrying a Downs fetus and should consider abortion.
Virtually all these claims that “my doctor said I should consider aborting because the baby had Downs, but I didn’t, and the baby turned out to be perfectly normal” are false, because they skip over the huge detail that no doctor ever actually suggested proceeding with an abortion, but rather suggested amniocentesis and noted that IF amniocentesis confirmed Downs, THEN the woman might want to consider an abortion. Of course, some of the claims date back a few decades, to when there was no way of definitively confirming Downs, and even gauging probability was much less accurate. No doubt there were cases back then where a doctor suspected Downs and recommended abortion (perhaps after consideration of some other factors as well), and the baby turned out not to have Downs at all.