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July 07, 2004
Prenatal testing without amnio fluid test?
This article is especially interesting to me because of what I feel is a clear and present ethical issue: inadvertent abortions caused by amniocentesis. (Amniocentesis: Test in which fluid surrounding a fetus is analyzed, usually to determine if baby is at risk for birth defects, sometimes to determine sex.)
The issue: This procedure ought to be done later in the pregnancy, but sometimes is done between the 14th and 18th weeks. For these early tests, 1 in 200 procedures result in a miscarriage. 0.5% might not seem like a big risk, but consider these numbers:
If you get pregnant when you're 37 years old, there is a 0.39% chance that your baby will have down syndrome. It's a big enough risk that many doctors will insist that clients age 37-plus take this test.
When you multiply out the miscarriage risk of early-term amnio tests against the down syndrome risk for 37 year old women, it turns out that for every 100 fetuses that are diagnosed with down syndrome, 128 healthy fetus are miscarried.
For the time being, disregard the ethical issue of whether or not it's appropriate to abort a baby because it is likely to develop down syndrome. At the very least, this news article (below) promises to make prenatal testing a bit safer...
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http://www.biomedcentral.com/news/20040707/01
Some worry that mass spec technique described in PNAS could be used for sex selection [Source:The Scientist :: Daily News]
Posted by canton at July 7, 2004 06:24 PM