Also, I’ve heard that the risk is further diminished when the amniocentesis is done later in the pregnancy, which would make sense from lots of angles for those Catholic parents who do want to consider it. As Kathy Ratkiewicz pointed out, parents surely don’t need that much warning if their child has an unusual medical condition. A few months’ notice would probably be plenty.

But whatever you think of amniocentesis per se, I believe other, possibly safer methods of prenatal screening are being developed, so the time is surely going to come (probably soon) when parents do have to decide how much they want to know about their unborn children’s genes.

Anyway, thanks to everyone who’s commented. I hadn’t heard anything about this Senate legislation, so that was interesting, and I at least will certainly be glad to sign the petition.

You are absolutely right. I work with men and women and have friends who have developmental disabilities. One thing I’ve learned is no one can judge whether someone else has a good life or not. These friends and acauaintances of mine with dev disabilities consider themselves to be pretty average and the biggest ‘barrier’ in any of their lives is society’s attitude toward and prejudice of them, far bigger than their disability itself.

Of course, the screening for Down’s Syndrome did not come through until later. He does not have it. In that time, I was able to learn that the screening does NOT tell anything about how severe the case is, nor about the child. Learning about the paucity of information that that diagnosis would have provided made me realize how stupid is the assumption that a woman would want to abort her child based on it.

We were not Catholic at the time. Our son has led us into the Church. He first demonstrated to us what life before birth is and that parents love their children before they are born. Ultrasound is truly a gift from God as it allows us to peer into a, heretofor, closed world and actually see the life growing there.

We were glsd to know the sex of our yet-to-be-born baby so we could prepare for him. If he had had any problems, I would have appreciated the time to prepare for dealing with those problems as well.

I would hope that any woman going for such testing would have an ultrasound at the same time and BE ALLOWED TO WATCH IT and go in with the firm conviction that NOTHING learned from the testing will cause her to consent to an abortion. We did not go in thinking that if anything were wrong we would abort. We went in thinking that if anything were wrong, we would want advance knowledge in order to prepare.

Mother of a son

For all we say about how great and beautiful people with Down Syndrome are, nobody’s ever going to hope that for their child, and no matter when you found out it would be a shock. I guess the delivery room seems to me a supremely bad place to get that shock, when hopes and emotions are already running so high, but I see what you mean that it could be better to hear it when those hopes are attached to an actual person. On the other hand, if you knew beforehand, you might already have “supportive people” lined up to help — a local support group, parents with Down Syndrome kids of their own who are willing to take calls from you while you’re figuring things out, etc. Anyway, I guess the point is clear. Knowing earlier would probably make the pregnancy harder but the delivery and early weeks of parenthood easier. Take your choice.

Of course, an additional advantage of amniocentesis (which doesn’t only test for Down Syndrome, of course, though that’s one of the big ones) is that most of the time it reveals a healthy baby, which relieves a few of the expectant parents’ worries (not that there aren’t a million more, but still.)

Anyway, I certainly don’t think there are moral obligations either way — at least, not unless they’re testing for a condition that could also be treated in utero. But as long as I was on the subject, I just thought I’d throw out that, for all the evil of the practices that commonly follow it, amniocentesis does not per se seem to be a morally objectionable procedure.