Women’s experiences of prenatal screening and diagnosis

Age is now widely recognized by women as a risk factor, which, as I shall argue below, may be a mixed blessing.

Abstract

Although most pregnant women worry about the possibility that there might be something wrong with their baby, few have any specific grounds for this. Statham, Green and Snowdon (1992) found 'the possibility of something being wrong with the baby' to be one of the highest scoring worries in a sample of over 1800 women in early pregnancy, with only 11% being not at all worried. However, when asked 'Have you any reason to think that your baby might be more likely than any other to have some sort of a problem?' only 13% said 'yes', and these were primarily on grounds of age. Age is now widely recognized by women as a risk factor, which, as I shall argue below, may be a mixed blessing. Women take part in screening programmes in order to be reassured that their babies are healthy, rather than with any expectation that they are not and, as Farrant (1985) and Green, Snowdon and Statham (1993) have argued, it is important for service providers to appreciate the implications of this.KeywordsPregnant WomanDown SyndromePrenatal DiagnosisUltrasound ScanningMaternal SerumThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.