Santorum told Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer that it’s used to "recommend abortion."Rick is right, the current statistic for parents who abort after a diagnosis of Down syndrome is 90% according on the source used by Pulitzer Prize winning series of articles, "The DNA Age: New Prenatal Test Puts Down Syndrome in Hard Focus" by Amy Harmon of the New York Times. Somehow the Tampa Bay Times didn't find this source, readily available by a simple Google search on pre-natal testing. It seems Senator Santorum has a better command of the facts, and an interest in telling the truth. The Tampa Bay Times states;
"Amniocentesis does, in fact, result more often than not in this country in abortion," he explained during the CBS News interview on Feb. 19, 2012.
Separately, we checked Santorum’s statement from the same interview that "90 percent of Down syndrome children in America are aborted." (We found that Half True — some regional studies bear him out, but the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says it’s difficult to generalize for the entire nation.)The source quoted by the New York Times is NCBI a publication of the National Institutes of Health, not "some regional study". It is echoed by a recent article in the Daily Telegraph from the UK.
Prof Joan Morris, professor of medical statistics who carried out the research at Queen Mary, University of London, said: "We are getting more pregnancies with Down's syndrome because women are having their babies older and because we are screening more accurately and screening more women, there are more terminations.More testing equals more diagnoses, which leads to more terminations. Why is this too hard for the Tampa Bay Times to follow? One suspects there is an agenda present. The same agenda Rick Santorum alluded to when he said that women are pressured to abort babies with pre-natal dianoses like Down syndrome. The same agenda Down syndrome advocates fear when they make statements like this in the Telegraph article.
Carol Boys, Chief Executive, Down's Syndrome Association said: "We realise that tests will continue to become more accurate at increasingly earlier stages of pregnancy.Sounds to me like there are many people out there who are concerned about the pressure to abort unborn babies with Down syndrome. Would that be because its a well known fact? Rick thinks so; he went on to state in his interview with Bob Schieffer that physicians often pressure women to have an abortion. He speaks from personal experience which is inarguable.
"It is therefore even more important that families undergoing the screening process are given non-directive counselling and accurate, up-to-date information about Down's syndrome."
I have collected dozens of testimonies in the past six years which prove him right. Here are three, a medical student, and two expectant mothers:
One medical student who asked not to be named remembered this from his class on prenatal testing. The professor stated that it was standard practice to counsel a woman whose prenatal diagnostic test came back positive for Down syndrome to abort. I asked "what if she says she wants to carry her baby to term?" to which my professor responded, "then you tell her, that from the day that child is born, her life is over."
Read a passage from my book, "A Special Mother is Born" where a mother describes her doctor's reaction to her daughter's pre-natal diagnosis.
The doctor came in and told me the baby had excessive water in her brain and a large hole in her heart. He concluded that the baby had some sort of a chromosomal abnormality, possibly Down syndrome. I felt as if I was in a daze. “What can I do to help her?” I asked, trying to keep my heart from racing. He told me it was too late. At first I didn’t understand what he meant. Then it hit me that he meant an abortion would have taken care of everything. Anger crept in and I answered back, “She’s my daughter. God gave her to me.” The doctor just stared at me, turned around and began writing a prescription for an amniocentesis. I refused since this carried an increased risk of miscarriage. It was clear to me that the future trips I had to take to this doctor’s office would be awkward, since he was clearly upset with my decision to keep my baby.No the doctor did not say anything but this mother felt the hostility and dreaded her future pre-natal visits.
Pressure. But she had a supportive husband and faith community behind her.
Another mother I counseled was not so lucky; an unmarried Latina immigrant whom I'll call Maria chose to abort at 20 weeks because her doctors told her that her son "couldn't do anything". He could never learn to read, tie his shoes, or go fishing with his father. She felt overwhelmed and was bullied into a late term abortion, causing her much emotional stress.
This is not choice, this is eugenics, which states that some humans have more of a right to life than others, recalling the T4 Program of the Nazis where the disabled were put to death even before the extermination of the Jews. It seemed that no one cared to speak up for them but a few bishops. They needed a politician like Rick Santorum in Nazi Germany. We need one like him in the US where Obamacare is starting to resemble a socialistic state with each new revelation of what it contains.
