By Jessica Easthope
Debbie Gleeson watches her son Shane smile big on his graduation day, but she still thinks back in horror to the first thing her doctor said about him.
“I never believed in abortion and to this day I don’t believe in abortion but at that moment they’re telling me there’s no option because he’s going to die anyway,” she said.
Debbie was told, without a doubt, Shane would have Trisomy 13, a rare genetic disorder that causes severe intellectual and physical disabilities and that he wouldn’t live beyond a week.
“They said you need to think about not only yourself but what about your daughter, that’s not fair to her to bring her brother into her life and then a week later he’s dead,” Debbie remembers her doctor saying.
But Debbie’s case isn’t rare. An analysis done by the New York Times of noninvasive prenatal tests show they’re wrong 85 percent of the time.
“As your risk of carrying a baby with Down Syndrome goes down, your risk of having a false positive goes up and that’s the data they’re not presenting,” said Dr. Tara Sander Lee, the director of life sciences at the Charlotte Lozier Institute.
Sander Lee says every day thousands of women across the globe get these false results – prompting them to seek out an abortion.
“If I would have listened to them because of a test to end his life, a test that wasn’t even true,” said Debbie.
“If the test is positive they are often pressured to abort this child and are given the worst possible scenario,” Sander Lee said.
She calls this a modern form of eugenics.
“This is a whole other layer to the abortion industry that is deceptive that at the heart of it wants to get rid of people who look and act differently,” said Sander Lee.
The tests are screenings, not a diagnosis. In Iceland close to one hundred percent of women who get positive results for down syndrome, terminate their pregnancies.
“They made it seem like he wasn’t even a human like oh you don’t want that,” said Debbie.
Currently more than a dozen states prohibit discrimination abortions based on prenatal screenings, New York is not one of them.