This seems to miss the point entirely. Even for their worst example the odds of the fetus having it go from 0.005% to 7%. That's valuable information even if it's not perfect or somewhat hard to understand.
This would be valuable for running some extra tests (possibly more expensive, but more accurate), but not for, say, decision to abort the kid, which is what usually "hangs in the air" after such a test result.
"A 2014 study found that 6 percent of patients who screened positive obtained an abortion without getting another test to confirm the result."
Maybe people aren't informed enough. It is my experience that some doctors tend to cut conversations short and some people are shy/insecure enough not to pry answers out of them.
In this case, that would be a tragedy, given that statistically 5 of those 6 aborted fetuses were healthy.
Edit: I found the following comment in the comment section of this article, which appears to address the same issue:
I am a physician with a PhD in Biomedical Informatics. Most patients who receive these tests do not see a maternal fetal medicine doctor or genetic counselor, and no one actually explains that the tests they are receiving are “screening” or “diagnostic.” Your opinion that this article does a disservice to patients reflects your unrealistic assumption that most of the doctors ordering these tests are actually communicating effectively with patients (or frankly, even understand the tests themselves). In my experience, they usually aren’t/don’t. Articles like this “fill the gap” on patient education when doctors are unable to explain math and risk (i.e., most of the time).
That’s a tragedy. Maybe there needs to be regulation requiring results are delivered by genetic counselors rather than physicians. Or maybe this is willful patient error.
That depends on the person though doesn't it? I'm not sure what I'd do in that situation. But 7% seems awfully bad odds for painful and debilitating life.
I guess that depends on the exact scenario. There are likely people with a variety of conditions who enjoy their lives vs having not been born. It brings up a seemly logical contradiction that we terminate fetuses (potentially viable in some cases) on the assumption that they don't want that life yet we don't allow people who want to kill themselves to do so.