The tragedy of prenatal screening
There is no such thing as a wrongful birth
The BBC recently ran a story about couples who had been wrongly informed by Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust that their unborn children were at risk of serious abnormality and strongly encouraged to abort. Two couples were subsequently informed the tests were “false positives” and that they had aborted children who did not have the health issues they were originally diagnosed with. A further couple chose to have a last-minute scan the day the abortion was booked to find their child’s medical complication had resolved itself, and their son was born, completely healthy. It is impossible to read these families’ stories without being deeply moved. While the hospital trust has repeatedly acknowledged failings and in a number of cases paid significant sums to those who received inadequate care, no amount of money can compensate for the lives lost.
These cases highlight a number of issues related to the care of pregnant mothers and their unborn children. Firstly, there are the pitfalls of chorionic villus sampling (CVS), a means of early screening for foetal abnormalities, typically carried out before amniocentesis (week 15-18 of the pregnancy). The NHS acknowledges that both invasive procedures carry significant risks, including the risk of miscarriage of around 1 in every 200 pregnancies. As the Nottingham cases make apparent such analyses can be wrong, including where various complications are not picked up by the screening, and only come to light at, or after, the child’s birth. A number of cases of so-called “wrongful birth” have been successfully contested, including within the UK, where parents have argued that they would not have carried children to term, had their medical conditions been correctly identified through prenatal screening. “Wrongful birth,” like the “right to abortion” is an insidious invention.
Dealing with seriously disabled children is a much-needed antidote to prenatal screening
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Essentially, this view of children involves a crude and dystopian quality-control approach to human life, where those children who do not meet the requisite criteria are deemed not worthy of life. In a way that is related to artificial reproductive technologies, the creation and destruction of human life, at its most vulnerable stage, is being removed from God’s good providence and placed in fallen human hands. The children themselves are no longer perceived as precious image-bearers, unique and God-given, to be received as gifts, but commodities or products, which can be rejected if deemed faulty or substandard in some way. The Bible presents a vision of children — without caveat or qualifications — as a gift. To receive every such little one is to welcome Christ himself into our midst. The experience of those who parent and work with seriously disabled children is a humbling and much-needed antidote to prenatal screening. All too often such perspectives and voices are equally filtered out, a pointed challenge and rebuke to the cult of choice, autonomy, and the never-ending quest for physical “perfection,” which begins while the child is still within the womb.
Returning to the Nottingham NHS case: would these abortions have been any less wrong if the children did indeed have the conditions the tests suggested? The answer the Scriptures consistently give is a resounding “No.” Every abortion, performed for whatever reason, is a desperate tragedy. 252,122 abortions in England and Wales (the figure for 2022) is a blight on our nation and an offence to God. And, lest we forget, 98 per cent of abortions that take place in the UK are in situations where both mother and child are healthy. The only “defect” such children had was to be “unwanted”. The crisis we face is bigger than one or two families, it goes beyond one or two NHS trusts; it is a crisis that affects us all. Our culture has lost sight of the significance and value of every human life, from conception. Until that vision is restored, until we understand the Creator who gives each one of us life, in whose image we are made, and for whose glory we exist, such tragedies will continue to play themselves out. These will not just be the high-profile cases that make the news, but the hundreds of families every single day where choice and control are privileged over the gift of a child’s life.
