New Report Exposes How Doctors Pressure Parents to Abort Based on False Diagnoses
Imagine you’re an expecting mother, and you’ve just received the heartbreaking news that your unborn baby has a chromosomal disorder, and your doctor says it’s fatal. The doctor explains that an abortion would be the quickest solution and that without one, your baby will die anyway in perinatal hospice. These are the only options presented.
It’s cruel and unreasonable to expect a mother or father in this situation to realize they’re being misled. But in a disturbing number of cases, that’s exactly what happens.
A recent report by the National Catholic Bioethics Center on Health Care and Life Sciences documented how physicians are often reticent about the prognosis of children diagnosed in the womb with supposedly fatal disorders. 61% of parents who received such a diagnosis said they felt pressured to abort, and in 39 states, “fatal fetal anomalies” and “non-viability” are legal justifications to do just that.
The problem is that, as the report puts it, “there is no universally accepted definition of a lethal or fatal fetal anomaly.” Diagnoses generally classified as “fatal” include “trisomy 13 and 18, severe brain malformations, conditions leading to lung underdevelopment, and absent or severely damaged kidneys.” Yet roughly half of children born with these conditions survive their first 12 months, and many live for years.
Other conditions, like Down syndrome, are compatible with “decades of survival”, yet often result in pressure by physicians to abort or even withhold life-saving care. That may be why between 67% and 85% of such diagnoses result in termination.
In reality, many of these supposedly “fatal” diagnoses aren’t reliable. The New York Times reported back in 2022 that false positives are incredibly common with prenatal tests for a number of chromosomal disorders, with screenings for a few conditions returning false positives 60-90% of the time!
Worse, parents hit with this news are often told all sorts of inaccurate things. When surveyed, 57% of moms and dads who received a prenatal diagnosis said healthcare providers told them that if their child survived, he or she would live a life of suffering. Half were told their child would be a vegetable and live a meaningless life. And 23% were warned that giving birth to their disabled child would ruin their marriage or family.
Parents who choose not to abort when anomalies are detected before birth are frequently pressured into perinatal hospice, which is where infants go to die naturally. But often, this leads to newborns being denied life-saving care that would be given to any other infant, contributing, ironically, to the supposed “lethality” of their conditions.
As the author of the bioethics report, Dr. Martin McCaffrey put it, these diagnoses have become a “self-fulfilling prophecy”:
If physicians say a condition is lethal, it becomes lethal. When parents are counseled that a prenatal diagnosis is fatal and offered no hope for supportive medical interventions, they are left to choose between abortion and perinatal hospice… Lethality begets lethality.
The damning fact exposed by this report is that too many healthcare providers are functioning like self-appointed eugenicists, dictating to parents which little lives are worth living and which are not. This perpetuates misinformation around children with chromosomal and other disorders, all of whose lives, however long or short, are precious in the sight of God.
This has to stop. Thankfully, reports like this move us in the right direction, exposing the word games played with terms like “fatal,” “lethal,” “terminal,” and “compatible with a meaningful life.” These games are played at both ends of life, justifying abortion and infanticide on one hand and assisted suicide and euthanasia on the other.
Doctors need to be honest and “fulfill their duty to offer parents informed consent.” It’s their job to heal, not to kill. And it’s certainly not their job to exaggerate or lie about the lethality of conditions when they believe children who have them are better off dead. Many already know this, but too many, apparently, do not.
Parents also have a crucial role to play by staying informed and insisting healthcare providers give them the true accuracy of prenatal tests. They should also know that hospice isn’t the only option. As the report concludes, those with children who have life-limiting disorders have every right to demand their children be stabilized, evaluated, and otherwise given the reasonable, life-saving treatment offered to other infants. Parents don’t have to give in to the pressure of self-fulfilling prophecies.
Lastly, all of us, whether we have a child with disabilities or not, must insist upon a culture that welcomes human life as a gift. The ugliness of encouraging parents to kill their newborns is born of a lie: that human beings are products to be optimized or returned if “defective.” But we’ve seen where this lie leads. It leads to a world where no one is safe from the fibs of physicians playing God. We should prefer a world where more people respond to suffering with the words of God’s Son: “Let the little children come to me.”
Photo Courtesy: ©Getty Images/Drazen Zigic
Published Date: February 24, 2025
The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of CrosswalkHeadlines.
BreakPoint is a program of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. BreakPoint commentaries offer incisive content people can't find anywhere else; content that cuts through the fog of relativism and the news cycle with truth and compassion. Founded by Chuck Colson (1931 – 2012) in 1991 as a daily radio broadcast, BreakPoint provides a Christian perspective on today's news and trends. Today, you can get it in written and a variety of audio formats: on the web, the radio, or your favorite podcast app on the go.
