I was sitting in the waiting room at an ultrasound clinic a few weeks ago, steeling myself for a needle in the stomach that would tell me if my baby had Down Syndrome.
One of the routine blood tests that accompanied my (perfectly normal) 12-week scan was off the scale and, coupled with my ‘advanced maternal age’ had served to skew the calculation that gives you a ‘number’ on your chances of chromosonal abnormality.
Having been told my number was one in two a few days prior, you can imagine my frame of mind.
Opposite me was a lady I estimated to be in her late 60s, about the same age as my own mother. A woman emerged beaming from the consulting room and handed her a black and white image.
“Oh my,” the lady said, tearing up. “Isn’t it amazing what they can do these days?”
Just one generation on from when this woman was pregnant with her daughter, we have more information than our mothers could have dreamed of. Ultrasounds, blood tests, CVS, amniocentesis, and now a new blood test (available only privately at this stage) that can test for genetic abnormalities as early as 10 weeks and tell you the sex to boot.
My mother is frankly baffled by all this talk. In her day, she says, the doctor wouldn’t even let you make an appointment until you’d missed at least two periods. She thinks she might have had a miscarriage once at about seven weeks, but she’s not sure. When is a miscarriage a miscarriage and when is it a late period?, she reasons.
These days, if you’re trying to conceive, especially if you’re having fertility treatment, you know you’re pregnant at four weeks (and as we all know, that’s actually only two) leaving you 36 weeks to worry about what might go wrong.
Top Comments
I would never advise any woman to have any test that was not conclusive. The nuchal test is a prime example. It doesn't prove anything, but causes much unnecessary stress for women who are then often put into a difficult position. In my case I was 42 when i found myself unexpectedly pregnant with my 3rd after 20 years infertility and 2 IVF babies. My risk was assessed as 1 in 9. That scanning doctor did everything in her power to convince me to have an abortion (all the while denying that she was doing so) and clearly thought i was nuts not to even consider it. When I asked for more info to contextualise the score she told me that she had only ever seen two worse results: both 'incompatible with life'. When the time came that an amnio could have been done, my wonderful ob-gyn recommended against it, unless I planned to terminate, and when i found that the amnio too could be inconclusive i agreed.I had a very difficult pregnancy anyway with severe hyperemesis and my usual pregnancy problems. I had to take steroids so that I could eat something as I was 43 kg @ 10 weeks. I prepared myself as best I could for a Down Syndrome baby - having been advised by the scanning doctor that that was 'the best i could expect'. Morphology scans were encouraging but of course not proof. My son was delivered by Caesarean @ 37 weeks. He was perfect. No - not perfect, he had a large strawberry mark on his back. He is currently in his final year of primary school, and one of the happiest, sunniest people i've ever met. He often fells me how glad he is to be alive and how wonderful he thinks the world is. I wonder how many other children are aborted because of a test result like this? If I had been a different kind of person - by which i mean, younger, less pigheaded, less opinionated - I might have taken that woman's urging to heart and gone ahead with an abortion. And everyone would have said, well, it was probably for the best. How wrong they would have been.I'm afraid I do not understand the sentiments I've read here and heard elsewhere - that the baby was 'very much wanted' but they decided to terminate because there was something wrong. Do they only very much want the baby they imagined? The perfect one? In my case I knew my husband would have great difficulty with a disabled child, and I had two sons at that stage under 5. My husband was out of work and I had just returned to mine. But I simply could not believe that it was my right, then or ever, to decide who should live and who should die - whether inside my body or outside it. i know this is not a popular or fashionable stance to take - but I think it's important for all views to be heard.
When I found out early last year I was pregnant at the ripe old age of 38 I decided against the nuchal tests. I knew I would love my baby regardless. At 18 weeks our routine ultrasound showed that my precious son had and absent nasal bone and therefore a high chance of having Down Syndrome. I refused to have amniocentesis because the 1 in 100/200 chance of losing him was too high.
When he was stillborn in September at 37 weeks (not because of the DS) he did indeed have it and he was still the most perfect tiny person I have ever seen.
All the new tests might mean peace of mind but they also mean more stress.
We are trying again and if it happens I will do the 12 week tests, even though it would make no difference, but invasive tests that increase my chance of losing my child will NEVER be an option for me.