Whenever my wife got pregnant we were always pushed to do prenatal testing. We’d decline every time. But doctors never stopped asking, even urging. We told them it wouldn’t make any difference to us.
Prenatal testing leads to countless abortions for no reason at all. Companies are profiting so shutup!!!
These companies are preying on expectant mothers, playing on their worst fears. Many times, followup tests are very expensive and sometimes painful so women will sometimes abort their children because of some insane “test” that if often wrong.
But these companies are making money and so many people take these big companies claims as gospel. They’re not. In fact, the NY Times article points out that some tests are wrong 85 percent of the time.
Ms. Geller had been misled by a wondrous promise that Silicon Valley has made to expectant mothers: that a few vials of their blood, drawn in the first trimester, can allow companies to detect serious developmental problems in the DNA of the fetus with remarkable accuracy.
In just over a decade, the tests have gone from laboratory experiments to an industry that serves more than a third of the pregnant women in America, luring major companies like Labcorp and Quest Diagnostics into the business, alongside many start-ups.
The tests initially looked for Down syndrome and worked very well. But as manufacturers tried to outsell each other, they began offering additional screenings for increasingly rare conditions.
The grave predictions made by those newer tests are usually wrong, an examination by The New York Times has found.
That includes the screening that came back positive for Ms. Geller, which looks for Prader-Willi syndrome, a condition that offers little chance of living independently as an adult. Studies have found its positive results are incorrect more than 90 percent of the time.
Nonetheless, on product brochures and test result sheets, companies describe the tests to pregnant women and their doctors as near certain. They advertise their findings as “reliable” and “highly accurate,” offering “total confidence” and “peace of mind” for patients who want to know as much as possible….
Alberto Gutierrez, the former director of the F.D.A. office that oversees many medical tests, reviewed marketing materials from three testing companies and described them as “problematic.”
“I think the information they provide is misleading,” he said.
Patients who receive a positive result are supposed to pursue follow-up testing, which often requires a drawing of amniotic fluid or a sample of placental tissue. Those tests can cost thousands of dollars, come with a small risk of miscarriage and can’t be performed until later in pregnancy — in some states, past the point where abortions are legal.
The companies have known for years that the follow-up testing doesn’t always happen. A 2014 study found that 6 percent of patients who screened positive obtained an abortion without getting another test to confirm the result. That same year The Boston Globe quoted a doctor describing three terminations following unconfirmed positive results.
Three geneticists recounted more recent examples in interviews with The Times. One described a case in which the follow-up testing revealed the fetus was healthy. But by the time the results came, the patient had already ended her pregnancy.
How often does that happen? It’s impossible to know.
We’re running headlong into an era with the motto “Trust the science.” But what we have here are amoral capitalists marching under the banner of “science.” Body count be damned. The bottom line is the only matter.
