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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   22118 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 1, 2025

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This seems to be a pretty good review paper on the topic, and the average is somewhere upwards of 2/3 of prenatal Down's diagnoses end in abortion, but the range varies by location and time.

One interesting tidbit is that the rate was going down pre-Dobbs:

This hospital-based study from the University of South Carolina found that termination rates decreased from 78.6% (22 of 28) in 1972–1996 to 33.3% (3 of 9) in 1997–2000. Many of the remaining studies had overlapping study periods and clinical and geographic heterogeneity that precluded evaluation of temporal trends. However, the three population-based California studies, which presented data on mutually exclusive populations from different time periods, demonstrated a statistically significant decrease in termination rates over time, from 88.3% (1989–1991) to 72.2% (1995–2000) to 61.4% (2005–2007) (χ2 test for trend = 37.196, df = 2, p < 0.0001).

I'm curious about the causality there and any complicating factors to the analysis.

Iceland's rate is famously close to 100%, and The Beeb suggests the British rate is around 90%.

Of course, Iceland, Britain, etc have much higher rates of prenatal testing.

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