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My child was diagnosed in the womb with a 75% chance of Downes with just a blood test. I chose to not pursue any other tests because I said it didn’t make any difference. He is now a perfectly healthy 18 year old.
Yet, I don't think that it's unreasonable for parents to desire to know during pregnancy that they will be having a special needs child.
I remember when our AFP test came back indicating an elevated risk for Down Syndrome for our oldest. The moron nurse midwife wrongly read the statistical result as an 80% chance of our son having Down. In that we'd previously been diagnosed years before as infertile, it was an especially difficult thing to hear.
We had no intention of killing our son. And we were pretty damned offended when it was suggested to us that we might wish to avail ourselves of that “choice.” Yet, we desired to learn all we could to take care of our child, and if he really had Down Syndrome, we wanted to find out, to start to learn and prepare. We also wanted time to prepare our families. We also would have likely searched out some sort of support group, because, you know, we were about to become first-time parents at a somewhat advanced age after many years of disappointment, and we were kind of shaky about being first-time parents even to a child born normal and healthy. We really, really needed the support if that's where things were going.
But if he didn't, we didn't want to spend months learning about something not relevant to caring for him. We didn't want to tell our families about the possibility. We didn't want to join support groups without knowing for sure what was going to happen.
We tested - he didn't have Down Syndrome. It turned out that the reading of the results by the nurse midwife was confused. It wasn't that he was 80% likely to have Down Syndrome, but rather that his risk was 80% greater than average. Instead of having a risk of about 1/3 of 1%, the risk was about a bit over 1/2 of 1%.
Well, our son was not born with Down Syndrome. If the initial test results had been handled properly, we wouldn't have done the additional testing.
But it isn't quite right to use a broad brush that everyone who wants to definitively know is thinking of killing their child.
There can be a legitimate desire for more and better knowledge.
This new test discussed in the article actually eliminates risk of a miscarriage. It can be a blessing. That many will use it for horrible evil does not mean everyone has that intention.
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