Daily Archives: April 22, 2005

Prenatal Testing

Jeanette at Oh How I Love Jesus in her post Aborting the Disabled points us to an article with the same name in Christianity Today.

Senators Sam Brownback and Ted Kennedy are sponsoring legislation to require doctors to provide current medical information, treatment options and information about support services to parents of children that have been diagnosed with a disability based on prenatal testing.

A study was done that showed that many parents felt “pressured” into aborting.

I have a disabled daughter. She has epilepsy, moderate hearing and vision impairments and a developmental delay. Genetic testing was done when she was about a year old. She was found to have two chromosomal abnormalities; there are extra genes on her tenth chromosome pair and her nineteenth chomosome pair has a ring in a mosaic pattern. Each chromosome pair usually looks like a number eleven 11, hers have one that’s in a ring, or circle configuration so they look like a 10 and the mosaic is every other pair. So her 19th chromosome looks like this: 11 10 11 10 11 10 11 10…

When I became pregnant again, we decided to have an amniocentisis test done. We didn’t know if our daughter’s disabilities were a “fluke” or if they were the result of mixing the genetic material of her father and I. We were told that the odds were one in two humdred that anything untoward would happen. The procedure seemed to go just fine. We were asked what we would do if the test results showed the same genetic abnormalities. They asked if we would abort. The answer was a very loud NO. We wanted the testing so as to be prepared to deal with a disability. We didn’t want to eliminate it.

Unfortunately, I “hit the lottery” on that one in two hundred chance… Two days after the procedure, I got very sick, high fever and vomiting. We went to the hospital and they couldn’t find a heart beat. The next evening, I went into labor and delivered a perfect tiny boy. From his butt to the top of his head, he fit on my hand from the heel to the fingertips.

The hospital performed an autopsy. He died of a strep infection. Otherwise, he was perfect.

I guess this goes with the parents feeling pressured into aborting. I didn’t quite feel that, but the fact that I was even asked….

Welcome ByrdDroppings readers. Thank you Lorie.

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