**Written by Doug Powers
Ok, I realize this will be the second time I’ve singled out CBS News in the past day, but they’re asking for it as if they’re standing outside the Dan Rather entrance to journalism school with hands in pockets and lunch money taped to their foreheads. Check out this effort to frame abortion as some sort of advancement in the field of medicine:
We’re talking about human beings and they use the term “eradicate” like what’s being dealt with is smallpox or malaria:
With the rise of prenatal screening tests across Europe and the United States, the number of babies born with Down syndrome has significantly decreased, but few countries have come as close to eradicating Down syndrome births as Iceland.
Since prenatal screening tests were introduced in Iceland in the early 2000s, the vast majority of women — close to 100 percent — who received a positive test for Down syndrome terminated their pregnancy.
My wife and I have friends who have a son with Down syndrome and he’s a great kid, so I find the term “eradicating” to be nauseatingly chilling in the worst Orwellian sense. And do the proponents of this see where it could lead? What other undesirable traits, disorders or potential inconveniences to the living could be detected and eliminated? The slippery slope is hardest to see when you’re happy dancing at the top of it.
Important point from actress Patricia Heaton:
Yep. Also, the screening test isn’t anywhere near 100 percent accurate:
When Thordis Ingadottir was pregnant with her third child at the age of 40, she took the screening test. The results showed her chances of having a child with Down syndrome were very slim, odds of 1 in 1,600. However, the screening test is only 85 percent accurate. That year, 2009, three babies were born with Down syndrome in Iceland, including Ingadottir’s daughter Agusta, who is now 7.
CBS pointed out that example of a false “negative” in detection, but not mentioned is the rate of false positives, which leads into to this collateral damage-covering caveat from a hospital counselor in Iceland:
Olafsdottir responded, “We don’t look at abortion as a murder. We look at it as a thing that we ended. We ended a possible life that may have had a huge complication… preventing suffering for the child and for the family. And I think that is more right than seeing it as a murder — that’s so black and white. Life isn’t black and white. Life is grey.”
“May have had…”
**Written by Doug Powers
Twitter @ThePowersThatBe
