Genetic Counseling

with the tools at our disposal these days, genetic counseling is practically a standard part of pre-natal care (at least in my mind). it's always best to be as educated as possible about anything, but particularly when you're bringing a new life into the world. finding out about your and your partner's family history, and how those histories combine to create possible genetic abnormality scenarios, is responsible parenting. all that the counseling (and testing if you choose to go further) does is prepare you for the possibilities that may arise, such as CF or Tay-Sachs or any other condition that your baby may be born with. ultimately for us, it wouldn't change anything - we'd keep the baby no matter what (unless there was something direly wrong that would create a very short and painful life for the baby).

it was calming to find out, though, that our histories provide for an extremely low chance of any type of abnormality (barring those that occur naturally and randomly). being Jewish, it's standard to get tested for Tay-Sachs before having a child - this has been ingrained in the mind of every Jewish person from the point of conception. but since Cindy was not born Jewish and her family isn't Jewish, and neither of our families have a history of Tay-Sachs, the chances of our child having Tay-Sachs is about 1:360,000, rather than the roughly 1:750 for a Jewish-Jewish Ashkenazic union (according to National Tay Sachs & Allied Diseases Assoc.). we also learned that because our family histories are so different, any of the minute chances we had for any other type of abnormality kind of cancel each other out (to put it simply). so all in all, our developing family is in pretty good shape.