THE Rotunda is not the first maternity hospital in the Republic to offer amniocentesis, but it is certainly the first to admit to it publicly. As a result of this announcement, we are seeing the hijacking of yet another social issue by lobbyists and campaigners with their own agendas protected in the realm of people do not have to think too long before declaring what they believe to be "the right thing to do" when a mother discovers that she is carrying a baby with a profound genetics defect.
But as in the X case, pristine ethical arguments about pregnancy termination whatever side they are on dissolve in the face of reality.
Many people who were firmly 591 against abortion changed their minds when they learned a 14 year old girl who was pregnant through rape would be forced by the State to bear her child. And so it is with prenatal screening by amniocentesis or any other means.
The proportion of staunchly antiabortion parents who subsequently change their minds and have terminations after learning they have an abnormal child is 30 per cent, according to British statistics.
Dr Peter McKenna, master of the Rotunda Hospital, thinks the moral of the story is obvious parents journey to the very core of their being making such decisions and unless it happens to you, it is impossible to know how you will react.
Until this week, such agonising decisions have remained largely outside the realm of public debate. Throughout the 1990s, about 200 Irish women a year travelled to Belfast for amniocentesis. In the past six months, 20 women have had amniocentesis at the Rotunda Hospital out of 35 considered for the procedure this by no means heralds an age of amniocentesis for all.
The Rotunda intends doing no more than 60 of the procedures a year. Many hospitals already perform amniocentesis in the treatment of rhesus negative foetuses, but until they start publicly offering prenatal screening through amniocentesis, most Irish women who want it will still have to travel to, Belfast.
Dr McKenna has observed that women who choose amniocentesis are among the most well motivated he has met in terms of wanting to do the best for their babies.
There are nearly 600 genetic abnormalities which can be diagnosed antenatally and the list grows by the year. A healthy woman aged 40 and older has a 3 to 4 per cent chance of having a baby with some sort of chromosomal abnormality, such as Down's syndrome, compared to a 1 per cent risk for women under 40. At 45, a woman's risk of having a Down's syndrome baby is one in 25.
People who carry genes for various chromosomal disorders take even greater chances if the women becomes pregnant. Many such defects carry a 50/50 chance of inheritance.
Whether the risk is due to heredity or age, the parents have to deal with the same dilemma. Do they want to go blindly through nine months of pregnancy before discovering whether their babies are affected or do they want to know before the baby is born?
If they decide they want to know, amniocentesis is the safest way of finding out. The pregnant woman lies flat on a bed while the practitioner uses ultrasound scanning to view her foetus on a TV monitor. Then, taking care not to harm the baby, the practitioner inserts a thin, 4 in hollow needle into the amniotic fluid surrounding the foetus and extracts a teaspoonful or two.
The pain for the mother is about the same as having a blood sample taken.
The amniotic fluid, yellowish in colour but sometimes tinged with a small amount of blood, contains cells from the foetus, which are cultured in a laboratory for two to three weeks. Chromosomal testing enables doctors to pinpoint hundreds of chromosomal abnormalities a well as telling curious, parents the gender of their unborn child.
AT THE Rotunda, amniocentesis is carried out from 14 weeks gestation onwards. Because the results take two or three weeks, the earliest that termination can take place is at 17 weeks, which is almost halfway through a pregnancy, a time most mothers have started to bond with their babies and can feel them squirming within.
So it is a brave woman who is even willing to countenance the real possibility her child could be abnormal. But while it is tempting to think that ignorance would be bliss, there are many condition which can be treated before birth if they are diagnosed.
"Amniocentesis means as much for Irish obstetrics as for Irish women because prenatal treatment is the way of the future," says Dr McKenna. "The whole area of DNA probing is going to explode enormously in the next 10 years.
The myth that testing necessarily equals termination is dangerous misinformation, according to Vivienne Parry, founder of Birthright, author of The Antenatal Testing Handbook and presenter of Tomorrow's World on BBC television.
"Testing is not about termination, in my view, testing is about information. Would people in Ireland condemn a mother to only finding out at birth that her baby had Downs' syndrome, when she could have known at 15 to 20 weeks, which would allow her to prepare for the birth of the baby?"
In deciding whether to have amniocentesis women also need to that the procedure itself a one in 100 risk of spontaneous miscarriage.
The risk of having a Down's syndrome baby is only one in 1,000 at 27, but by 38 it is one in 100. Doctors usually advise women to consider amniocentesis after the age of 36 or 37 when the risks of Down's syndrome and spontaneous miscarriage are equal. The risk of the syndrome increases with age because eggs are formed before birth and by the time a woman is 35 years old, so are her eggs.
For the majority of women who have the test, the results will be greatly reassuring and they will be able to continue their pregnancies in, peace. But those women who discover their foetuses are abnormal face agonising decisions.
From the Rotunda's experience, a positive amniocentesis result by no means implies abortion. Fifty per cent of the patients in the Rotunda who have so far discovered their foetuses are abnormal decided to terminate their pregnancies. The rest have decided to go ahead and have their babies despite Down's syndrome and other disorders.
A potential nightmare for parents' will be that in some cases, diagnosis will be ambiguous because a positive test result for a chromosomal disorder does not always indicate the extent of the handicap.
For example, a boy with a 46 XYY chromosome count will score 10 to 15 fewer points on an IQ test than his siblings, but does this mean that his life should be terminated before birth?
Dr McKenna predicts that of the 5,000 Irish women who have abortions in Britain every year, about 3 per cent will be women having terminations following prenatal diagnosis by amniocentesis.
However, he hopes amniocentesis will ultimately reduce the number of abortions by reassuring older women and carriers of inherited disorders that their babies are healthy, thereby preventing them from aborting possibly healthy babies out of ignorance and fear.