Dateline, last night
I tried to listen to Dateline while doing the dishes last night, but found it too distressing. A smart, privileged couple were expecting a baby with a heart defect and Down Syndrome. I do not intend to minimize their anguish. But I was truly aghast at the Dateline reporter’s implication that every couple with a difficult pregnancy faces a ‘choice.’
Wasn’t there a time when the choice was made when a couple decided to have a child? And then they accepted what they received, though that might be difficult? I was also a little miffed at the assumption that smart, accomplished people deserve a smart and sccomplishment-able baby. That just ain’t the way it works in the real world......

Greg and Tierney Fairchild were overjoyed when they learned they were expecting a baby. But the couple would soon face news they never imagined, and a choice they never thought they’d have to make. The challenge that lay ahead would test their faith, their love for each other and above all, their love for a child they had hoped for since the day they married.......
Greg was looking ahead. He knew if the baby did have Down Syndrome, he and Tierney would face an excruciatingly difficult choice — a decision that, either way, would have major repercussions on the rest of their lives.
The decision is whether or not to terminate the pregnancy? “That’s right,” says Alicia.
Or to have an abortion.

As adults, Greg, raised a Baptist, and Tierney, a Catholic, had come to support a woman’s right to choose. But now that Tierney could be that hypothetical woman, abortion was no longer a philosophical position, but a painfully personal possibility.

“I really believe in the woman’s right to choose,” says Tierney. “And yet, I thought in my own case, I didn’t know what I would do.”

They wouldn’t have much time to decide. Tierney was 21 weeks pregnant. The legal deadline for abortions in Connecticut is 24 weeks — just three weeks away on August 14.

At this point I could listen no more.
I think they did the right thing.
I hope their child will never have to watch a tape of this. And know that his parents were even considering a “painful personal possibility.”