A zeal for killing: Women aren't being told how inaccurate prenatal testing is

Women are killing their unborn babies because they think, based on certain tests, that their baby might be "defective".

While that's a horrifying echo of the Nazi belief that there are lives not worth living what makes it even more horrifying is that in many cases the test results are wrong and their baby was perfectly healthy.

An Irish couple aborted their baby because they were told their baby had no chance of living a healthy life due to Edwards Syndrome.  Aside from the fact that some people with Edwards Syndrome do manage to live good lives what the doctors lied to the parents about was that the test is not 100% accurate.

The Irish Times newspaper reported that the test is 99% accurate with a 0.15% false positive rate.  Now to most of us 0.15% is pretty small. But to put it in perspective for every 1000 babies who were tested 1.5 would show up as having Edwards Syndrome when they didn't.

That's the thing that people often don't understand about false positive rates; they are a percentage of all the people tested not a percentage of all the babies who have the condition.

What that means is that the more babies who are tested the more who will be falsely diagnosed and the more who will be aborted.

The number that is often used is something called the Positive Predictive Value(PPV) which is the percentage of all positive results that are in fact correct.  For example if in a test for Downs of 100 mothers and 10 tested positive if the PPV were 40% then  6 of those positive results would be incorrect and 4, 40%, would be correct.

Clearly since women are aborting their babies on the basis of these tests one would expect PPVs of 99.99999999999; after all parents don't want to learn that they murdered a healthy baby.

But that's not the case. There's a great article at the Federalist that goes into great detail which you should read.

Here let's look at the tests used for Downs Syndrome since women are usually encouraged to abort Downs Syndrome babies even though Downs Syndrome adults are very grateful for not having been executed.

In blood tests for Downs Syndrome the PPVs were around 42%. That means that for every 10 positive results roughly 6 are incorrect, the baby doesn't have Downs, and 4 are correct, the baby does have Downs.

Because the testing companies, and the abortionists, don't want women to stop buying their products this information is not clearly explained to parents.

When parents hear things like a 0.15% false positive rate very few will realize that that means that if enough women are tested then there will be lots of false positives.  Even worse the whole issue of the PPV isn't something that the average non-scientist/statistician is going to intuit especially if they are in a highly stressful situation with the Dr recommending that their "defective" baby be "terminated" for her own good.

In a world where Iceland is proud that pretty much every Downs baby is killed it's important to know what the cost is.

For example in Iceland 80-85% of expectant mothers take prenatal testing for Downs.  Iceland is proud that few Downs babies are born there anymore.  Every year there are around 4500 pregnancies in Iceland which means that in any given year about 3960 women will undergo testing for Downs.

If the false positive rate is .15% that means that roughly 6 babies each year could be aborted who don't have Downs.

One of the strongest objections against the death penalty is that innocent people are executed. If we knew for a fact that every year 6 innocent people were being killed few people would support the death penalty.

But because the left has a zeal for killing the unborn and a general rejection of the goodness of children they're perfectly comfortable with sacrificing that many innocent babies in order to eradicate people who they feel are "inferior"; those folks with Downs.