Reclaiming Our Children: A Blog About Healing After Abortion

The Impact of Abortion After Prenatal Testing
Elizabeth Ring-Cassidy and Ian Gentles

Note: The following is an excerpt from the book Women's Health After Abortion.

In
advanced industrial countries, prenatal testing in order to detect
fetal abnormalities has become routine. The amount of genetic
information that has become available has expanded enormously in the
past few years. While there are a number of ways of carrying out these
tests, for each of them there is a danger of inaccurate results, and
for some of them there is the additional hazard of injury to the fetus.

In
past decades little emphasis has been placed on the psychological
outcome for women who abort a child owing to genetic disorders
following prenatal diagnosis. But one significant change in recent
years has been the growing amount of available genetic information
about individual fetuses. This information increases the likelihood
that a woman will have an for abortion, perhaps at a late stage in her
pregnancy.

Parents Unprepared for Diagnosis

Pregnant
women and their partners are often unprepared for the news that they
are carrying a "defective" fetus. An abortion undergone in haste and
under coercive pressure can have devastating consequences, not only for
the parents, but for their other children. Is enough being done to
inform women about the implications of prenatal testing, and to provide
them with alternative choices to abortion when tests prove positive?

There
often appears to be dissonance between the practitioner's understanding
of the purpose of prenatal diagnosis and the pregnant woman's
perception of the procedure. While the practitioner may view the
diagnostic tests as a way of preventing the birth of a "defective"
child, pregnant women seek them out for reassurance that their babies
are well and healthy.¹ For many expectant couples, the link between prenatal testing and abortion, at least initially, does not exist.²
Even when birth defects and abortions are explicitly discussed, the
pregnant woman and her partner often simply do not link this outcome to
prenatal diagnosis.³

This
may be in part because genetic counselors do not make this link
explicit to their clients. In her study of the effects of prenatal
diagnosis on the dynamics of pregnancy, Barbara Katz Rothman found
that, while genetic counselors might presume that selective abortion
would follow the detection of an anomaly, rarely did they offer any
information about actual abortion procedures. Indeed, some did not even
include a discussion of abortion in the first counseling session.⁴ Furthermore, they do not provide information favorable to children with special needs.

read the rest here: http://www.afterabortion.org/prenataltesting.html