Era Of Prenatal Testing Research Articles

Receiving the news of Down syndrome in the era of prenatal testing.

To explore the prenatal trajectory and the experiences of mothers of a child with Down syndrome (DS) at the time of receiving information or test results when participating in a nationwide prenatal screening program. An online questionnaire study was completed by mothers of children with DS born between January 1, 2010 and February 28, 2016 (n = 212). Data were collected between February 15 and 28, 2016. Most of the live born children with DS were diagnosed postnatally. The majority of their mothers had explicitly chosen not to have prenatal DS screening. Of the 39 mothers prenatally informed their child might have DS, only 49% were completely or mostly satisfied about the information provided by their clinical providers at that time. About 16% of women (of the 38 that answered this question) recall some perceived emphasis on the option of terminating pregnancy as the first choice. Mothers who had received a postnatal diagnosis rated the experience as more positive than their counterparts who received prenatal diagnoses. With recent developments in screening, more parents are expected to receive a DS diagnosis before birth. Meeting the parents' individual counseling needs at the time of prenatal diagnosis requires careful exploration of their personal values and preferences.

A new era in prenatal testing: are we prepared?

Prenatal care and the practice of prenatal genetic testing are about to be changed fundamentally. Due to several ground-breaking technological developments prenatal screening and diagnosis (PND) will soon be offered earlier in gestation, with less procedure-related risks and for a profoundly enlarged variety of targets. In this paper it is argued that the existing normative framework for prenatal screening and diagnosis cannot answer adequately to these new developments. In concentrating on issues of informed consent and the reproductive autonomy of the pregnant women the ethical debate misses problems related to the clinical pathway as a whole and to implicit normative attributions to clinical actions or the function of health care professionals. If, however, ethical debate would focus on the clinical context and on the ends of PND to a larger extent, it would be able to provide a more comprehensive analysis of the ethical challenges especially of the new technologies in order to be more adequately prepared for their implementation.