A Deadly Sham

Some people will do anything for money. There are hookers, pimps, Nigerian scam artists, Solyndra, etc. Then there are people who've figured out how to get women to abort babies via testing. Here are two good paragraphs:

What’s more is that, for all the talk of prenatal testing being only the sharing of information and not requiring abortion, test developers nonetheless count on most mothers terminating. They have to in order to justify the unnecessary costs of their testing. Over 99 percent of pregnant women are not carrying a child with Down syndrome. While a negative prenatal test may provide welcomed reassurance, from a dollars-and-cents perspective, it is an unnecessary expense. Developers of prenatal testing, however, have justified these unnecessary expenses by demonstrating through cost-effectiveness studies that such costs can be offset to the private insurer or the public healthcare system, provided that enough children prenatally identified with Down syndrome are terminated. In this way, prenatal testing is promoted as “saving” the health care system the added medical costs associated with Down syndrome. For all their public defenses, test developers nevertheless rely on a high percentage of abortions to justify the cost of their testing.

But the regime of prenatal testing for Down syndrome is exposed for the sham that it is when the double standard within prenatal testing is considered. In 2007, the same year that the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) recommended that all women be offered testing for Down syndrome, ACOG’s ethics committee issued an opinion finding that prenatal testing for sex selection was unethical. The same arguments for prenatal testing for Down syndrome can be made for prenatal testing for sex selection. Sharing the information about the sex of the child is simply respecting a woman’s right to choose by giving her information she can use to determine whether to continue her pregnancy. But, in the same year that ACOG said all women should be offered testing for Down syndrome, it also said it is unethical to use prenatal testing for sex selection because it enforces sexist opinions that one sex is more desirable or valuable to society or a family than another. The ACOG committees that worked on the contrasting statements failed to appreciate the doublespeak, since prenatal testing for Down syndrome reinforces discriminatory attitudes against those considered to have disabilities. Upon seeing a baby girl, strangers do not ask “why didn’t her parents undergo prenatal testing,” but that question is asked of parents when that little girl happens to have Down syndrome.

...but read the whole thing. Really shows the anatomy of an abortion industry boondoggle. I just heard about this on Hugh Hewitt's show, but it's half a year old.