Rebecca Taylor is a voice of sanity on the whole issue of genetic testing (she is responding to this LifeNews piece from Kristen Hawkins):

I have the utmost respect for Ms. Hawkins and I feel her anger and frustration. Having tested pregnant mothers and their partners for cystic fibrosis mutations, I am fully aware of how this information is being used. But I disagree that it is the “genetic testing [that] is killing little girls and boys like Gunner.” Genetic testing may be cited as the reason to kill a baby with a genetic disease, but the REAL killer is abortion on demand. Without legalized abortion, prenatal testing would be what it should be, a way to find out more about the life going in the womb, especially if something is going wrong. Without legalized abortion, the use of prenatal testing would be naturally limited to conditions that could benefit from some kind of prenatal intervention.

In fact the Catholic Church has no problem with prenatal testing, unless it is done with the intent to abort if the results are not what the parents want. Prenatal testing is only immoral when the parents are already planning to abort when the testing is acquired. I have a suspicion that this scenario happens less often than we think. After reading many heartbreaking accounts of women who have been pressured and harassed by medical professionals to abort their “genetically-defective” children, I suspect that most women go into prenatal testing because their doctor recommends it and then are bullied into abortion when the test results aren’t perfect.

The problem is abortion and a medical establishment that uses it as a “solution” to medical problems. Always has been. Abortion takes clinically useful information and makes it deadly.

Do read the rest.

That good science can be used to very bad things, doesn’t make the science itself bad. After all, we don’t condemn the testing of people for cancer or other debilitating diseases after birth even though assisted suicide and euthanasia are becoming increasingly more common these days. I certainly understand the misgivings that people have regarding prenatal genetic testing given the numbers of children who are killed in utero after negative test results, but, let’s be clear here, the real problem is abortion and the culture of death, not the testing itself.