Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm Shane Morris.

Imagine you're an expecting mother, and you've just received the heartbreaking news that your unborn baby has a chromosomal disorder, and your doctor says it's fatal.

The doctor explains that an abortion would be the quickest solution

and that without one, your baby will die anyway in perinatal hospice. These are the only options presented.

It's cruel and unreasonable to expect a mother or father in this situation to realize they're being

misled. But in a disturbing number of cases, that's

exactly what happens. A recent report by the National Catholic Bioethics Center on Healthcare and

Life Sciences documented how physicians are often reticent about prognosis of children diagnosed

in the womb with supposedly fatal disorders.

61% of parents who received such a diagnosis said they felt pressure to abort.

And in 39 states, fatal fetal anomalies and non-viability are legal justification to do just that.

The problem is that, as the report puts it, there is no universally

accepted definition of a lethal or fatal fetal anomaly. Diagnoses generally classified as

fatal include trisomy 13 and 18, severe brain malformations, conditions leading to lung

underdevelopment, and absent or severely

damaged kidneys. Yet roughly half of children born with these conditions survive their first

12 months, and many live for years. Other conditions like Down syndrome are compatible with

decades of survival, yet often result in pressure by physicians to abort

or even withhold life-saving care. That may be why between 67 and 85% of such diagnoses

result in termination. In reality, many of these supposedly fatal diagnoses aren't reliable.

The New York Times reported back in 2022 that

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