Globe Reporter Tells About ‘Choosing Naia’

Boston Globe journalist Mitchell Zuckoff recounted yesterday the story of an interracial couple faced with the news that they were pregnant with a disabled child—an account that will be available later this week in his new book.

Choosing Naia: A Family’s Journey is based on information gathered for an award-winning series of the same name published in the Boston Globe. The book is scheduled to be released later this week, and another installment of the series will appear in the Globe today.

“The story started as a story about prenatal testing and genetic testing. I started doing the story to discover where the scientific side of the equation meets the human side,” Zuckoff said.

In his talk at the Graduate School of Education, Zuckoff touched on the conflict inherent in medical technology, which gives early diagnoses of prenatal irregularities but gives no answer about what to do with the knowledge.

Zuckoff’s series traced Greg and Tierney Fairchild’s progress through their pregnancy with a child with Down Syndrome and the difficult steps they had to make every step of the way.

The difficult decision over whether to terminate or go ahead with the pregnancy was only the first of many challenges for the Fairchilds, Zuckoff said.

During a routine ultrasound en route to Martha’s Vineyard, the Fairchilds’ doctor discovered that Naia had a hole in her heart. The condition would require open heart surgery a month after her birth.

Naia’s disability resulted in her being jaundiced and unable to gain weight. For the first month of her life, the Fairchilds fought to bring her weight up to eight pounds, the weight required for her heart surgery.

Zuckoff started down the path to meeting the Fairchilds in February of 1998, when a pregnant friend had complications with her pregnancy.

Zuckoff said he initially had not planned to transform his series into a book. But he was convinced otherwise.

“It is a journalist’s responsibility to tell stories like this more often and in more depth, especially when the media is pushing us in the opposite direction,” he said.

To write his series, Zuckoff needed to find a couple that had just received similar crushing news about a pregnancy and were willing to share this experience with a journalist. Zuckoff called this “the journalistic proctology exam.”

He required the couple to be pro-choice—to highlight the dilemma they would face about whether to continue the pregnancy—as well as to be articulate, young and Boston-area residents, to ease the collaborative process.

The Fairchilds met every attribute, except proximity to Boston. They lived then in Hartford, Conn., though they now live in Virginia.

In August 1998, Zuckoff received a call from Tierney Fairchild after the couple had seen a memo he had posted on a counseling site.

“Mr. Zuckoff, I think you are looking for me,” she said.

He found them willing to open up their lives to him in the hopes that people might be more willing to accept Naia if they knew how the couple felt about their child.

“They have embodied the idea that we have to set the bar high for ourselves and our children,” Zuckoff said.

Zuckoff said he was originally unsure of whether he would be able to capture the experience of an interracial marriage in addition to their parental challenges. But, he said, he discovered their views on race provided a prism through which to look at entering the world with a disability.

“They understood that every time there was an interaction, the disability was there,” Zuckoff said.

His Globe series won Zuckoff the prestigious 2000 Distinguished Writing Award for non-deadline reporting from the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

He has also been honored by the National Down Syndrome Congress and the American Association on Mental Retardation.

A “Dateline” special on Greg and Tierney Fairchild will air in the next few weeks.

Yesterday’s audience of about 50 included parents of Down Syndrome children, educators and GSE students. Many asked questions following Zuckoff’s talk and slideshow.

Perhaps most memorable was 40-year old mother-to-be Mary Rutkowski. Five months pregnant, she said her recent experience discovering that her child is likely to be severely disabled made Zuckoff’s talk all the more poignant.