Reasons For Prenatal Diagnosis
There are three purposes of prenatal diagnosis: (1) to enable timely medical or surgical treatment of a condition before or after birth, (2) to give the parents the chance to abort a fetus with the diagnosed condition, and (3) to give parents the chance to "prepare" psychologically, socially, financially, and medically for a baby with a health problem or disability, or for the likelihood of a stillbirth.
Having this information in advance of the birth means that healthcare staff as well as parents can better prepare themselves for the delivery of a child with a health problem. For example, Down Syndrome is associated with cardiac defects that may need intervention immediately upon birth.
Many expectant parents would like to know the sex of their baby before birth. Methods include amniocentesis with karyotyping, and prenatal ultrasound. In some countries, health care providers are expected to withhold this information from parents, while in other countries they are expected to give this information.
Read more about this topic: Prenatal Diagnosis
Famous quotes containing the words reasons for and/or reasons:
“The lore of our fathers is a fabric of sentences.... It is a pale gray lore, black with fact and white with convention. But I have found no substantial reasons for concluding that there are any quite black threads in it, or any white ones.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“One of the reasons for the failure of feminism to dislodge deeply held perceptions of male and female behaviour was its insistence that women were victims, and men powerful patriarchs, which made a travesty of ordinary people’s experience of the mutual interdependence of men and women.”
—Rosalind Coward (b. 1953)