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Devan Weathers was pulling into her office parking lot from a lunch break when she got the phone call from her doctor.

She was 20 weeks pregnant with her second child and had received two abnormal ultrasounds. Her doctor had said she would be a good candidate for a new test called "Harmony," one of the increasingly popular noninvasive prenatal screening tests to enter the market in the past two years.

With a simple blood draw, the test can detect certain chromosomal abnormalities in a fetus with startling accuracy and earlier in pregnancies than ever before. It was during that parking lot phone call that Weathers got her test results and learned her baby girl would have Down syndrome.

"It may not have even been a two-minute phone call," said Weathers, 32, who lives just outside of Lexington, Ky. "I hung up the phone and started crying in the parking lot at work, all by myself."

After getting her test results, Weathers was certain she wouldn't terminate her pregnancy, but she didn't entirely accept it, either -- and she had...