Check with your hospital how many miscarriages they have had after amnio over the years. It doesn't have to conform to the 0.5% figure of 30 years ago, nor the "1%" figure routinely quoted on MN but is far from reality.
When I was pregnant with DD, I found out that in the ten years since this same doctor has been doing amnios there, he has had only one miscarriage and that was a 42 year old woman with other problems in pregnancy. That was 3 years ago and when I asked again recently (6 weeks pregnant these days) I found out that there hasn't been another miscarriage since.
A recent study, led by Keith Eddleman, MD, of
New York's Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, and published in the November issue of Obstetrics & Gynecology, sought to determine if amniocentesis still has the 0.5% miscarriage rate (one in 200 pregnancies) that it did 30 years ago, when the last significant research was done. Dr. Eddleman offered amniocentesis to 35,000 pregnant women; 3,000 women opted to have it performed and the outcome was the same for both those who had the test and those who didn't -- about 1% of the women in both groups miscarried.
In this study the amniocentesis-related miscarriage rate was 0.06%, or one in 1,600 pregnancies -- significantly lower than the 0.5% rate that came out of studies performed in the 1970s. Since then, there have been many innovations in amniocentesis safety, the most significant being the use of ultrasound technology during the procedure - doctors are able to view the baby and therefore determine where to insert the needle.
From here