1st Trimester Detection Of Trisomy 21
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Abortion, ScienceFirst, some history:
The formal story began in 1866, when a physician named John Langdon Down published an essay in England in which he described a set of children with common features who were distinct from other children with mental retardation. Down was superintendent of an asylum for children with mental retardation in Surrey, England when he made the first distinction between children who were cretins (later to be found to have hypothyroidism) and what he referred to as “Mongoloids.”Down based this unfortunate name on his notion that these children looked like people from Mongolia, who were thought then to have an arrested development. This ethnic insult came under fire in the early 1960s from Asian genetic researchers, and the term was dropped from scientific use. Instead, the condition became called “Down’s syndrome.” In the 1970s, an American revision of scientific terms changed it simply to “Down syndrome,” while it still is called “Down’s” in the UK and some places in Europe.
In the first part of the twentieth century, there was much speculation of the cause of Down syndrome. The first people to speculate that it might be due to chromosomal abnormalities were Waardenburg and Bleyer in the 1930s. But it wasn’t until 1959 that Jerome Lejeune and Patricia Jacobs, working independently, first determined the cause to be trisomy (triplication) of the 21st chromosome. Cases of Down syndrome due to translocation and mosaicism [...] were described over the next three years.
Now the Wash Post is reporting that new tests allow women an opportunity to find out in their first trimester if their child may potentially have “Trisomy 21 (Down syndrome.”
A first-trimester screening test can reliably identify fetuses likely to be born with Down syndrome, providing expectant women with that information much earlier in a pregnancy than current testing allows, according to a major study being released today.The eagerly awaited study of more than 38,000 U.S. women — the largest ever conducted — found that the screening method, which combines a blood test with an ultrasound exam, can pinpoint many fetuses with the common genetic disorder 11 weeks after conception. That allows women to decide sooner whether to undergo the riskier follow-up testing needed to confirm the diagnosis.
“This is a big deal for women. It’s going to have a big impact on care for women, not just in the United States but throughout the world,” said Fergal D. Malone of the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin, who led the study published in today’s issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
And, of course, this has implications for abortion decisions:
Screening women before the second trimester allows those who might opt to terminate a pregnancy to make that decision when doctors say an abortion is safer and less traumatic. It also gives those who want to continue the pregnancy more time to prepare emotionally for their child’s condition, and provides earlier reassurance to those whose babies are healthy, avoiding weeks of anxiety, Malone and others said.
These are tough decisions, and technology isn’t making them any easier. It’s just making the time between conception and decision shorter.
What do you think?
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November 10th, 2005 at 5:37 pm
I’ll just note that I find the entire wording of the post, and the Washington Post article — e.g. “That allows women to decide sooner … — not “couples,” not “prospective parents,” but only “women” to be depressing. Fathers do not exist. That sucks.
November 10th, 2005 at 5:51 pm
Do you really think a husband has any right (and I mean any) to hold dominion over a woman’s body? And if so, then what?
November 10th, 2005 at 5:59 pm
I think to presume fathers do not exist, to exclude them entirely from a discussion of birth, is sad. That’s what I said. Is that really so hard? It presumes a world where fathers drop their seed and go away. Is that the world you’d like to live in? Is that what a relationship should be?
Stop putting words in my mouth. You want to be a centrist? Stop working so damned hard to paint everyone who disagrees with you into a zealot.
November 10th, 2005 at 7:02 pm
Okay, first off I’ll answer your questions:
Is that really so hard? No, but I feel your response presents a slippery slope. That’s why I ask.
Is that the world you’d like to live in? We both live in that world now. But we also live in a world where people discuss these things and make decisions together. Is the latter preferable? Absolutely. But I’m not going to try and stop the former from happening because that is an extremely personal decision that I have no right to be involved in.
Is that what a relationship should be? Everybody defines relationships differently. But since you asked, no that wouldn’t be any type of relationship I would want to be.
Here’s the basic issue: you’re presuming that I’m presuming. I’m not. But the law of the land states that men don’t have the decision. Again, that’s why I asked you the question.
First, and respectfully, you’re putting words in my mouth. I asked you a question after you said the wording of my post suggested that “Fathers do not exist.” I never said that and I didn’t suggest it either.
Second, you’re starting to tread into some pretty personal ground here. In fact, this isn’t the first time. You did it recently with this comment about my life:
I never answered that post when you wrote it, but since this topic is being brought up again…I feel the need. Respectfully, your previous assumption is painfully incorrect. I’m 28. That pretty much gives me a good decade and a half to have an experience. And although it did hurt, I never considered it illogical for her to do what she wants with her own body. Nor was it any of my business. This is the way the world works, like it or not.
As for these new frustrations, well, I asked you a question. I don’t see it as me painting you into a corner. I apologize if that’s how it seemed. It certainly wasn’t my intention, but if that’s how it’s being received, I’ll retract it.
November 10th, 2005 at 8:11 pm
We’re not talking about what type of legal policy ought to prevail. We’re talking about the choice of wording by you and the Washington Post. At leastr that’s what I’m talking about. You seem eager to have some other fight.
I’m intertested in not only living in a world where couples can work through these awful decisions with love and respect, but in actually encoraging that to happen.
The wording that writes “father” and “couple” right out of the story before it begins is just sad. Every piece of writing leaves something out, presumes some reality. The reality in this writing is, I would argue, not the prevailing majority in most of America. Out-of-wedlock births and single-parent families are rising, but they are not yet the majority here.
Fathers don’t exist in your post. If they do, show them to me.
November 11th, 2005 at 12:16 am
I think I understand where we’re getting tripped up: I feel that the wording of the post and the legality are intertwined and can’t be separated.
We both acknowledge that legally the choice is solely the woman’s. And even though I believe two people making the decision is preferable, I’m not going to inject that opinion into this post.
And you’re right. Fathers don’t exist in my post because father’s aren’t necessarily involved. And given that they are not legally involved in the decision, to include fathers in the story and my post is, I feel, wrong and subjective. You think that’s sad. I think it’s accurate and it’s probably also why the Wash Post said it the same way. They must remain as objective as they can, and sticking with the legality is the only way to remain objective in a story like this.
Am I wrong?
November 11th, 2005 at 12:39 am
This is a result of the tragically stupid decision to make sexual relationships subject to government regulation. The government has no place in my sex life or yours.
Yet we let them in. And now we’re stuck with them. Rather than letting couples grapple with awful businesses like the life and death of a deformed child, there are now going to be government rules about it. You think it’s cool that the rules are meant to protect women from men. I think it sucks when men are legally locked out of parental decisions, but are held responsible for the children they have no rights in raising. I don’t think the women of America need more men standing up and chanting, “fathers have no rights.”
We now have marriages not as a communion of souls, but as a legal arrangement of government-granted “rights.” And even in a post on a medical article — having nothing to do with legal matters — the language of the writing utterly excludes fathers. It is written as though to talk about a pregnancy and say “couples” instead of “women,” to even acknowledge that a man just might be involved in a decision about a pregnancy, would break some taboo.
That’s where we’ve ended up. A world where fathers are erased out of the picture and nobody bats an eye except me, it seems.
Years ago, my ex-wife broke into my house and stole a number of things that were not joint marital property and did not even belong to me. They belonged to my girlfriend at the time. When the cops came and heard the story, they told me it would be pointless for them to do anything about it. The case would go nowhere. They had seen this kind of thing before. One of them shrugged and told me, “if you’re the man, you’re always wrong.”
And that’s sad for our children.
November 11th, 2005 at 1:29 am
I agree that they don’t have any right to be in our bedrooms. However, when it comes to the civil rights of a woman, I’m glad the government and the courts have gotten involved and found that women have the right to govern pregnancy decisions for themselves.
Cool? Jeezus Cal, are you serious? I believe in these laws because I don’t think a man should have any say over what a woman does with her body. I think your characterization of my comments is WAY overblown and playing in some fairly ridiculous territory.
I think many would take issue with that, including Alito. I’d also urge you to not assign such sweeping callousness to my comments. I’m not erasing anybody and neither has anybody else. To the points you’ve made in this discussion, fathers are part of the decision every single day. But it shouldn’t be up to the courts to legislate that the father SHOULD be part of it. The difference is significant and important to continuing a woman’s civil rights.
Well, I’m sorry that this happened to you, but those sound like some really crappy cops who gave you some horrible advice. But I don’t really see what this has to do with your argument. Because you’re a man, you’re screwed out of your rights to not having your or your co-inhabitant’s stuff stolen? That simply doesn’t make any sense, and the cop’s assertion of “if you’re the man, you’re always wrong” is provably false in case after case after case.
This discussion has certainly turned an odd corner indeed.
November 11th, 2005 at 4:13 am
Welcome to my world, bro. You think when the law gets into personal relationships it has to “make sense”? Lol! Like I said, come back after you’ve been through the family court system as a father and we’ll talk. Till then, we shouldn’t even attempt this.
My child lives, five days out of seven, in Third World squalor, in a filthy trailer with a woman who doesn’t feed him or make sure he goes out the door with the right clothes on or with his homework done. She chooses not to work, but lives off my support check (which is meant to support him, not her) yet she has a boyfriend who owns more land than I ever will.
If it wasn’t for my wife and I, my son never would eat a good meal or have new clothes or books or travel anywhere. But when I talked to my lawyer, who is now a county judge, about going for full legal custody, she told me to forget it; the courts would never grant it to the father unless the mother was a drug addict or a prostitute. That’s the world I live in.
My comment was about language. You pounce on me as though I had written about law. Now we’re talking about law, because that makes you happy. But what set me off is a whole lengthy post about parental decisions that was written with the underlying assumption that a father would have no contribution to a decision about whether his child is born or dies in the womb.
That’s not a matter of law. That’s a matter of language, of writers revealing their presumptions about the world they inhabit.
You and WaPo want to write about pregnancy decisions as though the human species reproduces by cell division. As though fathers are biologically invisible and legally silenced in any pregnancy decisions. And you say that is the position of the law. Go on, then, have fun with that.
And you’re way cool with things that way. And I say I hate that law.
Fathers have no rights before birth. They have none after, either, in my experience. Except the right to pay.
If you really want to play here, why don’t you tell me what rights you think a father has, or ought to have.
March 10th, 2007 at 7:18 am
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