Misdiagnosis, Prenatal testing & Abortion: what you’re not told

 

A horribly emotional story with a happy ending- a healthy baby.

Defiant mum refuses abortion pressure after misdiagnosis

Defiant mum refuses abortion pressure after misdiagnosis

Abortion offered at every appointment

“Can we stop talking about terminating and focus on the pregnancy?” we would ask.

I always thought that after 20 weeks you couldn’t do termination. But my obstetrician said, no, no. You can terminate pregnancy at 37 weeks in Victoria. She said, you will sign paperwork with lawyers, you will have an ultrasound, something will be injected into Ella, your baby, to stop her heart while you watch, then you go home and grieve for a couple of days and then you come back and deliver stillborn.

That was atrocious to me….

….Eventually we went to see a geneticist at the Royal Women’s Hospital and he asked me, who does your ultrasounds? I told him, and he said, well if she can’t find any markers of Trisomy 18, your baby’s fine. I said, what do you mean? And he said he’d just come back from a seminar where they discussed that CVS isn’t accurate because they are testing the placenta. It’s a placenta biopsy. The placenta sometimes performs a miracle, it heals the baby. It takes away the abnormality on itself and saves the baby. He said there were many cases proving that CVS is not that reliable….

….I was told also that, if I was in the public sector, the doctors wouldn’t pressure me so much to terminate. The public sector has strong lawyers that can protect them. Basically, I couldn’t sue. But in the private sector, let’s say Ella was born with Trisomy 18 and I was finding it really hard to cope, then I could’ve taken the doctor to court and sued her for the fact that she didn’t tell me how hard it would be.

 

Unfortunately what the vast majority of people do not know is that ALL of these tests that are performed during prenatal care have very high rates of inaccuracies, misdiagnosis, and errors. Pregnant women are given Ultrasounds now “routinely”- not just one, but most of the time, several U/Ss, without full transparency of the unbelievably high rate of errors and misdiagnosis, and more importantly, without full disclosure of all the risks to the baby with each and every Ultrasound that is done.

Every one one of these pregnancy/prenatal tests, from Ultrasounds, to Amniocentesis, Chorionic villus sampling, Embryoscopy, and Percutaneous umbilical cord blood sampling not only have dangerous risks to the unborn baby, but also have very high error rates. And when these test are then use to push abortions, the risks and errors have to be seriously questioned.

In the 12 years that I was a Maternal & Infant health advocate and activist, I have lost track of how many times I have heard this identical story. My own sister in law was told that my niece was going to be born with serious heart, kidney and brain defects that was hugely pressured by her doctors, the hospital and her own midwives to have an abortion. They used scare tactics right up until she was in labor, saying that her baby could be dead, die during labor or be born with serious brain damage….

…. yet on a lovely day in April, 14 years ago, my beautiful niece was born…. and was perfect in every way!

Until the medical associations, hospitals, medical schools and doctors are no longer funded by Pharmaceutical companies and ruled over by insurance agencies and threats of litigation for even questioning the safety of these tests, babies will continue to die needlessly, and will continue to be damaged by testing through highly questionable means.

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