For the pro-life community, stories of mothers who choose to keep their baby after receiving a prenatal diagnosis of a birth defect are seen as inspirational. I’m one of those stories, actually. In 2012, my husband deployed to Afghanistan while he was in the Marine Corps on New Year’s Day. Two days later, I had an amniocentesis after prenatal screenings indicated that my baby had a higher-than-normal risk of having Down syndrome; three days after that, I got a phone call confirming that, yes, my son did indeed have Trisomy 21, or Down syndrome. It was hard at first, and scary, and gut-wrenching. I cried for days. I mourned the baby I thought I had, because I didn’t know any better. I never considered abortion, but all of my hopes and dreams for my son felt like they had been destroyed. Of course, that went away as I learned more about Down syndrome. Today, Wyatt is a happy three-year-old who loves to sing and play with his brother and sisters. My dreams for him became the same as my dreams for my other children. Unfortunately, a world that is inclusive of my son, and others like him, does not yet exist.
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