Of course the national groups are not pro-life organizations. I’m wondering, though, if the misperception came from the medical outreach efforts of parents or parent groups whose admirable zeal was overshadowed by both a lack of training from other more experienced leaders and/or an axe to grind over the emotional scars from their own experiences.

Healthcare professionals may have interpreted the sole purpose of these well-meaning individuals as being to eliminate abortions of babies with DS (pro-life) and then made the leap from this being not just local but national as well.

That being said, there is an incredibly strong bias in our culture and our society against anyone who can be defined as “imperfect”. As I see it, the genetic testing scenario illustrates and exacerbates an existing problem in our society, but these doctors are not the cause. And if we are going to get them to take us parent groups seriously, we need to do what we can to work toward that common ground.

There is much work to be done, but it is heartening to have this piece of info in the toolkit when working with the medical community to try to make some change happen.

I don’t think that there was ever any doubt that NDSS and NDSC are not pro life organizations, so I don’t know where that ‘misperception’ came from.

and from what i have read/heard- many parents experienced a great deal of pressure to terminate a pregnancy once a diagnosis of DS has been obtained.

If the purpose of prenatal testing is not to weed out genetically ‘inferior’ children, why is so much emphasis being placed on developing new, more ‘accurate’ and earlier tests? DS cannot be treated in utero at the present time — why the push to find out so early if termination of affected fetuses is not the goal?

I also think that it was interesting that there were no representatives from Affiliates in Action invited to be part of this. I would have thought that Mark Leach would have been able to offer very valuable insight on this,so it is disappointing to see that he was not offered the opportunity to participate.