{"id":7128,"date":"2004-06-20T09:15:11","date_gmt":"2004-06-20T09:15:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2004\/06\/choosing.html"},"modified":"2004-06-20T09:15:11","modified_gmt":"2004-06-20T09:15:11","slug":"choosing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/06\/choosing.html","title":{"rendered":"Choosing"},"content":{"rendered":"

A A NYTimes article on prenatal testing and the burden of the consequent choices.<\/a><\/p>\n

But some couples who terminate pregnancies for fetal health conditions say no one has a right to judge them. A child psychologist in Atlanta who terminated a Down syndrome fetus earlier this year said she was outraged by people who told her, “If you have to have a perfect baby, you shouldn’t be a parent.”<\/p>\n

“I was like, `What!?’ ” said the psychologist, who is 35. “I’ve always been pro-choice, but now I’m pro-choice with a vengeance. Don’t tell me I have to have a baby with Down syndrome just because you say so.”<\/p>\n

And Cristy Hollin of Gladwyne, Pa., is unapologetic about having invasive procedures to test fetal cells early in the two pregnancies that followed the diagnosis of her first son’s condition as fragile X mental retardation. Neither fetus tested positive for the condition, but if they had, she said, she and her husband had planned to have an abortion. <\/p>\n

“You love your child,” said Ms. Hollin, who was told that the best she could ever hope for her fragile X son, who is now 11, was that he could one day read well enough to take a bus on his own. “But the fact is it’s really, really hard. When we went to have our other kids we said we’d be fools not to know everything we can.” <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A A NYTimes article on prenatal testing and the burden of the consequent choices. But some couples who terminate pregnancies for fetal health conditions say no one has a right to judge them. A child psychologist in Atlanta who terminated a Down syndrome fetus earlier this year said she was outraged by people who told…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7128","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nChoosing - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/06\/choosing.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Choosing - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"A A NYTimes article on prenatal testing and the burden of the consequent choices. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7128","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7128"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7128\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7128"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7128"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7128"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}