Choice by Karen E. Bender

Author:Karen E. Bender [Bender, Karen E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-1-59692-986-9
Publisher: M P Publishing Limited
Published: 2007-09-22T04:00:00+00:00

Geneticists analyzed my DNA and my husband’s, but they found no explanation there. We both had normal chromosomes, which meant that the baby’s abnormality was the result of a spontaneous duplication of genes that no one could explain. It was not a consequence of our ages. It was likely to cause severe mental and physical handicaps, but this was at best an informed guess. The guess could be confirmed only if the literature contained another case like ours, in which the effects of the abnormality were known.

Ten days after my phone call from my friend’s kitchen, medical literature yielded nine other cases of a partial trisomy on the second chromosome. My husband and I sat in the office of the geneticist who had led the literature search. I can still see her pretty, sharp-featured face as she explained that only one of the nine cases was close to ours in the amount of duplicated material, its location on the chromosome, and the fact that it was spontaneous and not inherited. That baby died twenty days after birth of multiple heart and kidney defects and would have been severely retarded had she lived. If we continued the pregnancy, our baby—also a girl—would almost certainly have all or many of the same defects, if she even survived until birth.

I remained largely numb as the geneticist delivered this news, though I sensed I couldn’t sustain my suspended state for long. Perhaps I was trying to delay the full impact when I looked across the desk at her and said, “It must be hard for you, telling people this kind of thing.” She gazed back at me as if from a great distance, without the least comprehension. Her indifference was like a slap, and I barely made it out of her office and into the sunlight, with my husband holding me up, before I heard a high-pitched, animal noise that seemed to come from someplace far away—the sky, perhaps. It was several seconds before I understood that it was coming from me.

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