# Woman has healthy baby after being advised to have abortion



## Miranda7 (Feb 12, 2007)

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1164378/Mothers-joy-gives-birth-healthy-boy-doctors-told-abortion-fears-suffer-deadly-disorder.html

Why do medics tell you things with such certainty when they can't be 100% sure of anything?

Sigh.


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## annacameron (Dec 16, 2008)

thanks goodness he is ok and she went ahead. good girl. 

the nasty answer to Miranda's query: because they are surrounded by people who look up to them and they start to believe they are infallible. 

the nice answer:

because they are not sufficiently trained in statistics to understand the (often counterintuitive) nature of the results they are looking at...

as a disgression, judges are the same about DNA results. I worry about miscarriages of justice on this basis.... when you see a 1/5 million chance of the criminal not being X, it seems pretty likely it is X who did it. Actaully, the stats can be very confusing and it might well not be. 

I know that seems  aweird thing to say....


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## chocolate_teapot (Sep 10, 2008)

I was told the same thing by a surgeon when I found out I was pregnant with my son (I had just been in an accident, had loads of xrays, anaesthetics and drugs without knowing about the pregnancy). Luckily I sought a second opinion from someone who actually knew about fetal risks - my son was born perfectly healthy but I still get shivers thinking "what if I had listened to the first doctor":


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