Antenatal Screening

Welcome to our website on Antenatal Screening. Now during pregnancy you will be offered various kinds of screening tests to assess your risks of having a baby with a condition such as Down’s syndrome, spina bifida, and other conditions. Although antenatal screening is about assessing levels of risk it cannot provide certain and 100% accurate diagnosis. So on this site you can find information about the different tests that can be carried out and the conditions they are looking for. You can also see other parents explaining how they made choices about screening and describing a wide range of their experiences.

Expecting a baby is usually a hopeful and exciting phase in people’s lives but it can also be a worrying time. As a parent-to-be you need a lot of information and support to help you make choices for yourselves and your unborn baby. The great majority of parents will have completely straightforward experiences and reassuring results. Sometimes people may have reason to be anxious beforehand, such as family history of a particular condition. But ultimately the results of screening are reassuring. Some parents choose not to have any or most screening tests during pregnancy. Half the interviews on this site are with people who had low risk results or indeed chose not to have screening at all. A minority of parents will discover through the screening process and further tests that their baby has a particular condition. They will then face the difficult experience of having to decide whether to continue the pregnancy or to end it. We have included interviews with parents who discuss this decision making process, such as accounts of what it was like having to end a pregnancy. But we’ve also included the experience of giving birth to a baby with conditions such as Down’s syndrome or a heart defect, and what life has been like for the family since the birth.

We expect that many of you will have very different information needs. To help you decide which areas of the site you wish to use we’ve grouped parent’s experiences accordingly. We are committed to giving  a full and honest picture of what it is like to experience particular aspects of health and illness and it’s important to be clear that the main purpose of antenatal screening is to detect if there are any problems with the unborn baby. However pregnancy is a very emotional time and you may wish to avoid making yourselves unnecessarily anxious. We aim to ensure that areas of this site which some people may find distressing are clearly signalled so that you can choose whether or not to visit that part of the site. We hope it has been useful to you.

Interview 08: For some reason I never really thought about not having the screening. I never thought about-, I think because I was looking forward to having anyone pay attention to me. Give me a little attention.

Interview 04: So I'm very much conscious of lying down, I knew what a disadvantage to feel lying down anyway. I’m sort of “ what, what?” “ Can I-, look I’m here can you tell me what you're seeing?” And, you know, they didn't want to because they weren't even sure what they were seeing, so that was quite difficult.

Interview 29: Then at the 21 week foetal heart scan, they told us that our son had a congenital heart defect.

Interview 30: We went off to go meet an awful lot of people that had been through different pregnancies, heart surgery, different disabilities, just to make sure that we knew what we were doing, to help with the decision making.

Interview 13:  And then I guess you just don't think about at the time you get given the information and you think you understand it, and it's not until you go away and look at it again, you realise it's just a set of numbers and you don't have a clue what they mean or what's normal and what's not.