Great little story from the Assemblies of God news service about people working to stop the selective abortion of special needs children.
Down syndrome advocates fear the pressure to terminate Down syndrome pregnancies can be overwhelming when parents are presented with the diagnosis and warned of the lifelong health challenges and varying degrees of mental retardation associated with the syndrome.
Add to that the rate of so-called “false positives” resulting from the current screening techniques, estimated as low as 2 percent to as high as 10 percent in various studies. The prenatal testing itself carries a risk of compromising a pregnancy.
“Sadly, many of those babies actually had no abnormalities,” laments Paula Wilburn, the mother of a child with Down syndrome and founder of Fun Coast Down Syndrome Association, a ministry of Praise Assembly of God in Bunnell, Florida, where she and husband Donald serve as senior pastors.
Wilburn and others fought for three years to get Congress to address the issue, and last September finally saw their efforts pay off when the House and Senate passed The Prenatally and Postnatally Diagnosed Conditions Awareness Act — a bill aimed at reducing the number of Down syndrome-related abortions in the United States.
In a nutshell, the act requires a pregnant woman receiving a Down diagnosis — prenatally or up to a year after birth — to be given current information about both the syndrome and referrals to support services and networks dedicated to assisting parents in raising a child with Down syndrome and other disabilities.
