Rachel Marie Stone, author of the newly released Eat With Joy (Intervarsity Press), has reviewed my new ebook What Every Woman Needs to Know About Prenatal Testing. She writes:

What Every Woman Needs to Know About Prenatal Testing deserves to be read widely and carefully for many reasons, not least because Amy Julia insists that families facing troubling prenatal diagnoses need opportunities to connect with other families already living with children with those conditions–in other words, she points out the biases of medicine's clinical context (ie. "here's the test result and here's what this means medically") and the need for women and families to have support in a social (or whole-life) context, i.e., "why don't you meet our daughter who has Down syndrome and see what our life is like?"

For those of you who read this blog regularly, I hope you feel as though you have been invited to do just that–to take a peek at some of the details of life in a family that happens to include a child with Down syndrome (and two other children who have their own particular needs!).

Rachel's post is worth reading not so much because she extols my ebook (though that, of course, is great news for me), but also because she relates the book to her own experiences with a dinner with various people with disabilities and the ministry of L'Arche. She concludes:

The vision of a joyful table where all sorts of people are welcome to feast and to fellowship and to flourish is the picture I have of the kingdom of God. It's a picture that's hard (maybe hardest!) to see on ultrasound screens or karyotypes, as Amy Julia so graciously (and, yes, nonjudgmentally, truly!) points out. If you are looking for this kind of hopeful picture, or facing frightening prenatal diagnoses, or wondering what questions to ask "before sticking out your arm" for a prenatal test, I urge you to check out Amy Julia's new book (and for that matter, her older one, too!)

 So, go to Rachel's blog to comment and enter the giveaway, and/or order your own copy now.