I'm 34. I was always going to have the NT test, and if the risk factor was high, I would have had an amnio to test further.

My reasons for having the test were:

- if we were going to have a child with a high chance of a detectable problem such as Downs Syndrome (as I understand it, the test doesn't only test for that, but will also pick up on other possible chromosonal problems), I wanted to know about it. This would allow my husband and I to first decide whether to keep that pregnancy or not, and if we did keep it, to prepare as best we could for the particular things that life was going to present for us. For me, it would be really bad to not get the test and then to have a baby with some problem that would have been picked up by the test. Not because it would be bad, necessarily, to have that child, of course, but because we would not have had the opportunity to discuss it between ourselves and to make what we felt was the best decision for our family.

Basically, there was no way I would put myself into a position where we would later regret not having the test because we actually needed that information.

I absolutely agree that there can be very good reasons for having the test even if you know you would definitely not terminate a pregnancy with a high chance of Downs Syndrome.

- secondly, it's another chance to get a look at the baby, to see that it's there and growing and healthy. And this is a wonderful thing

I did some reading about the amnio procedure, and my conclusion was that it matters a lot who does it. In this case, all doctors are not equal. So if I needed an amnio, I would have asked my OB to refer me to whoever she thought was the most highly skilled person in my city to do it, and we would certainly have cheerfully paid whatever it cost to do that. My understanding is that this would dramatically reduce the risk of amnio-induced miscarriage, so worth paying for, in my opinion.