Not all of the issues caught would have made it to birth, so it’s less than 1⁄270 live births—a bunch of chromosomal abnormalities end in miscarriage. It’s a little hard to say exactly how this affects the benefit of amnio. On the one hand, maybe you didn’t need to do anything for the cases that would miscarry anyway. On the other hand, there’s probably some value in knowing that this isn’t going to be a good outcome, and being able to choose a more defined outcome if you want.
It’s worth thinking a bit about what you would do if you found something. For instance, if you’re not going to abort if you find Down’s, then the value of finding goes down a lot. ~90% of people do abort in that situation so maybe that’s not the mainstream case, but that could cut down on 10% of the amnios done.
It’s a big-ass needle that they use for amnio. Possibly this will freak out some people more than others—i.e. the cost is higher if you don’t enjoy being stabbed by a giant syringe. I thought it was interesting to watch, but I wasn’t the one being stabbed, so YMMV.
Really agree with all of these, thanks. Curious, in your decision-making process, did you ever have a way to calculate “the chance of a really disabling (as bad as Down syndrome) disorder”?
A couple of thoughts, having been through this.
Not all of the issues caught would have made it to birth, so it’s less than 1⁄270 live births—a bunch of chromosomal abnormalities end in miscarriage. It’s a little hard to say exactly how this affects the benefit of amnio. On the one hand, maybe you didn’t need to do anything for the cases that would miscarry anyway. On the other hand, there’s probably some value in knowing that this isn’t going to be a good outcome, and being able to choose a more defined outcome if you want.
It’s worth thinking a bit about what you would do if you found something. For instance, if you’re not going to abort if you find Down’s, then the value of finding goes down a lot. ~90% of people do abort in that situation so maybe that’s not the mainstream case, but that could cut down on 10% of the amnios done.
It’s a big-ass needle that they use for amnio. Possibly this will freak out some people more than others—i.e. the cost is higher if you don’t enjoy being stabbed by a giant syringe. I thought it was interesting to watch, but I wasn’t the one being stabbed, so YMMV.
Really agree with all of these, thanks. Curious, in your decision-making process, did you ever have a way to calculate “the chance of a really disabling (as bad as Down syndrome) disorder”?
I looked up some stats, but unfortunately this was ~15 years ago and I have no idea where I found them or what they are.