Every one of them had either a perfectly healthy baby or a child who required some medical intervention before going on to live a pretty much normal life. Dozens of nearly identical stories. Miracle of miracles.
Or maybe not. I'm not saying that God does not heal some of the those babies. I know prayer works. I know God rewards the faith of parents who fight for their sons and daughters. But I also know the dirty little secret of obstetrics: the vast majority of OB's and maternity hospitals would rather send you to abort a perfectly healthy, wanted baby than possibly do a high risk delivery.
It's almost inconceivable that a person who has put in the years it takes to become a medical specialist would turn on the very patients he or she is dedicated to caring for. After all, if having a baby was easy and risk-free, we wouldn't need obstetricians. Who would hire a doctor to monitor their pregnancy knowing that person would come at it with the attitude that if anything is wrong you should just toss out the baby and try over, like they were a difficult letter you were writing? A lot of women don't have any choice. This is the overwhelming position of OBs and the maternity hospitals. What evil has corrupted them?
The problem can be summed up in one word - liability. Modern mother baby wards are amazing things. Big birthing suites with fancy equipment greet the women in labor, along with one of the highest staff-to-patient ratios in the hospital. New parents are pampered and offered gourmet meals to celebrate their new child. The biggest cost isn't the fine furniture, the state of the art machines, the specialist nurses or the even the brand new building. It's liability insurance. An OB in private practice can expect to pay up to $200,000 a year for liability insurance, with most paying at least six figures. For comparison, your GP probably pays $10-25K. Maternity wards pay far more.
The number one thing your doctor hears about from hospital administrators isn't "improve patient outcomes." It's, "reduce risk." Your health and your baby's health haven't been job one for decades. Risk management is. When faced with a fetus with any abnormal test results, the average doctor isn't thinking about how to help that child or how to prepare you for the possibility that your child will be medically challenged. He is thinking of how to get you off of his service. For him, financially, the best outcome is that you accept a referral for an abortion. Once you make that choice, his liability goes from millions of dollars to zero. So he gives you the worst possible scenario. If one in a hundred babies with that result die, you will be lead to believe your baby is NOT going to survive birth. "Termination" will be treated as the next, obvious course of action. It may even be scheduled without any discussion. Unless you demand them, no postmortem tests are done on aborted babies. There are no statistics on how often a perfectly normal, possibly viable baby is violently murdered for the crime of having one bad test result. Given the number of women who have prepared to deliver a baby on its deathbed only to be handed a child with no apparent health problems, the number is probably staggering.
Why are baby doctors and hospitals in that situation? There are three primary reasons. First, the statute of limitations (the time you have to sue) is often much longer for birth issues than for other issues. The injured party usually has two or three years from the time the injury is discovered to file a complaint. But if the injured party is a minor (such as newborn) that clock doesn't start ticking until they are 18. The doctor could be sued two decades after the delivery for a birth injury. Second, delivering a baby is risky, even with a healthy mother and baby. Women and babies die in childbirth every day even with the very best medical attention available. Birth is the hardest thing most human bodies ever do. Systems pushed to the edge sometimes break. That's just reality.
A thing called "wrongful birth" is the third, ugliest, reason. The existence of abortion has created a pot of gold for lawyers representing parents who claim they would have aborted if they had known they were going to deliver a sick or disabled child. Sometimes, they even represent those children. A doctor can be sued, often for the entire cost of caring for a special needs child, if they might have predicted that outcome and didn't or if they downplayed the possibility. The court system has cast doctors as the gatekeepers in a eugenic dystopia where only the physically perfect should be allowed to be born. A nightmare that grows as genetic components are identified to more and more conditions. Can a child who inherits a gene making them more likely to develop cancer or suffer from depression sue the doctor who delivered them? Someday, they might.
I hope, if you've read this far, that you want to change this. That this is not the sort of care you would want as an expecting parent or the situation under which you want your OB to operate. Fortunately, there are things that can be done to change two out of three of these issues. There is no such thing as a wrongful birth. The law needs to acknowledge that. Write your congressmen, especially at the state level. While you're at it, demand legislation that distinguishes between malpractice and chance. Sometimes, the doctor does everything right and someone dies anyway. Sometimes the doctor makes a very human mistake. As long as doctors are human, this will happen. Holding a doctor liable for millions in either of those situations just drives people out of medicine. It doesn't make for better doctors or better patient care. If a doctor is grossly negligent or committing actual malpractice, he should be charged by the criminal justice system. Tort reform along these lines would literally save lives every day.
If you're pregnant, don't assume that every OB will consider your child as much their patient as you are. Most of them won't. Find a pro-life obstetrician. Your local pregnancy center probably knows who they are and they'll be happy to tell you. Look for a Guiding Star clinic or a catholic hospital. If you cannot find a pro-life OB, be upfront with your doctor before those tests start coming up. Most importantly, if your doctor tells you that the ultrasound or other screening shows something horrific, take it with a grain of salt. Take it with a whole block of salt. Prenatal diagnosis is not an exact science. Most doctors will treat any fetal health test result that is outside normal limits as a 100% positive sign of the worst possible scenario. That's just not accurate. It's hard enough to diagnose many diseases in an adult who you can see and touch, who can tell you where it hurts and answer your questions. Imagine trying to diagnose someone from nothing but an ultrasound and some blood work. Sometimes they get it right. But a lot of the time, they get it wrong.
Lastly, remember that no diagnosis is a life story. A fetus who does have a heart problem or down syndrome or may not live long is still a human being. Every second of their life is precious. Every struggle they will face is part of the universal human condition. Every one of them was knitted together by a loving Father in His image. Every one has a purpose.
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