You shouldn’t assume that the purpose of prenatal testing is just to push abortion. With increasingly sophisticated testing available, serious abnormalities can be detected in great detail, and sometimes treated in utero, or a decision made that the baby will have a better chance if it’s delivered early so that treatment for a life-threatening problem can begin before it’s too late. I suspect that’s what happened in Gov. Palin’s. She had the testing, and it obviously wasn’t because she planned to abort if Down syndrome was diagnosed. But Down syndrome babies often have life threatening physical abnormalities, including heart problems, that can kill them or do irreparable damage before their due date. Most likely, it was detection of a problem of this nature that led to the baby being delivered a month ahead of schedule. If she hadn’t had the testing, the baby might never have been born alive.
Whatever decision parents make about a child with serious abnormalities, it’s better to have as much information as possible as early as possible. If they decide to abort, it will happen much earlier, and if they decide not to they will at the very least be much better prepared to start caring for a child with the particular problems theirs has, and they may have a chance to keep the child alive that they wouldn’t have had without prenatal testing. In some cases, the only abnormality is one that can be fully corrected by surgery, but only if it’s early enough. At least one otherwise normal baby was saved by in utero open heart surgery. The serious abnormality was detected early, and it was determined that it would kill the baby before it was far enough along to be delivered early and survive, so they just went in and did the surgery, sewed baby and mom back up, and let the baby continue to grow with a properly working heart.