byronchild - logo

special feature
Prenatal
Testing
– Technological
Triumph
By Dr. Sarah J. Buckley, MB, ChB, Dip Obst.
You’ve never received bad news from
the doctor’s surgery before, and this
was even worse because it was about
your unborn baby. Your doctor was
kind and gentle, and there must have
been a lot of talking, as you were in
there for over 30 minutes, but all you
can remember is a creeping numbness,
a fog that thickened around you,
and the words ‘blood test’, ‘high risk’
and ‘Down syndrome’.
byronchild 14
That evening you try to retrieve
some detail for your partner
but today is still foggy and you
have little memory of the ‘pretest
counselling’ that the doctor said she
gave you before the test. The number 1
in 300 comes to mind, but this doesn’t
make sense: how can there be all this
worry over such a small number?
Eventually you find the pamphlet in
your bag. Your doctor called it ‘invasive
testing’, and said it was the next step, if
you want to take it. It is called amniocentesis,
which means taking a sample
of your baby’s waters. ‘Poor baby’, you
tell your belly as you absorb the information,
‘the test might kill you, or else
you might have Down syndrome. Then
we would have to choose whether or
not to get rid of you ourselves’.
That night you dream of a field
of babies: perfect pink chubby babies,
skinny grey babies with horrible deformities,
Chinese babies, African babies,
Romanian babies, and they all want to