Dr Ben Goldacre in Saturday’s Guardian and in his excellent blog details the inaccuracies contained in the BBC’s reporting of the Down syndrome story last week.
There has been a small rise in Down’s babies being born. But BBC Radio 4, in a half-hour show last Monday (presented by the actress with the trustworthy voice who plays Ruth in The Archers), and then on the Today programme, has misleadingly interpreted the data. It’s not true that the rise is caused by more parents choosing to go ahead with pregnancies in these cases.
As Goldacre shows, more foetuses are being conceived with Down syndrome because of increased maternal age. But there has not been the increase you’d expect to see in live births - presumably because the same numbers (more than 9 out of 10) are still aborted. The NHS Behind the Headlines website outlines this discrepancy.
Why would the BBC not emphasise the fact that women who postpone having children (for instance to pursue their careers) are putting themselves at a biological disadvantage? Are there ideological underpinnings to the BBC’s misleading interpretation of the data?
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4 responses
Thanks for pointing this out. My good lady wife’s first reaction upon hearing this story was, “Isn’t that going to be because women are delaying motherhood ’til much too late?’. And she is not normally predisposed to critiquing the news.
It is highly suspicious that the BBC ran the story the way they did. I wonder if the news editor that day was some career woman who was trying to defy her own natural body-clock and couldn’t bear to report the obvious conclusions?!
Erm… What’s wrong with delaying having children, especially when testing and legal abortion are an option when there are serious problems? My Mum married late, and had me when she was 40. I’m now 43, far from intellectually defective (a graduate), and she’s still around, too. Other friends of mine have alos had children late, without problems. Add to this the fact that in earlier time periods, women also had children late – at the tail-end of large families. (One grandmother and three great-grandmothers of mine all kept breeding well past 40, with no noticeable harm to them or the children.) The only new factors are that some women are starting child-bearing later, and that they can do something about it if there are problems. I couldn’t give a stuff about my own alleged ‘body clock’, because I’ve never wanted children in the first place, but I think the alleged biological disadvantages of late parenthood need to be set against the social advantages of having mature and competent parents.
During the time period that the live birth rate for children with down syndrome increased in England, the live birth rate decreased by 50% In Denmark… this would seem to support the BBC’s initial contention that people are more accepting of the condition. An increase of maternal age would only mean that there would be an increase in detection rate because women over 35 are routinely given testing for the condition.
During this same time period that live births of children with Down syndrome increased in England, the number of live births were halved in Denmark. Given that maternal age is increasing, that would only mean that there are more cases diagnosed prior to birth as women over 35 are routinely given tests for down syndrome. BBC contention that England is more accepting of children with condition appears to be supported by the number of live births in England versus Denmark.