I mean, I have to say that I think that screening is a good thing. It's a good thing because, irrespective of the stage during my pregnancy, it picked up that my baby wasn't well, so therefore it is hugely valuable. And therefore I think it's important that it's done.
My concerns with it are that the way that it is presented to pregnant women is not as rounded as it should be in that - I mean, it's very difficult when the majority of pregnancies are okay to be all doom and gloom.
And I am sure there is a, a very fine line between scaring the daylights out of people or making them think that everything's going to be okay. But at the moment I think that it is in favour of, “Everything's okay. This is just to show you that everything's okay”, rather than “This is because things go wrong and this is why we're doing it.” And I think that follows from every piece of, every book that I've read, and every pregnancy book that I had, bought, borrowed, whatever, not once, nowhere in the book does it mention termination, anywhere.
And it's horrendous and nobody should ever want to read it, but it's almost like they should have a chapter about it - at the back of the book, hidden - that says, you know, somewhere, small print, “If you want to know about this read it. If you don't, don't. But it's there for you if you need it.”
Because, you know, if we'd had the ARC [Antenatal Results and Choices] leaflet before we had any screening, if we'd had the information now that we had before the screening, we'd have done it differently. We'd have wanted to know who the best man was, and we'd have wanted to know what the gold standard of testing was. And we'd have gone there. And it wouldn't have mattered what it cost. For us, we're in a situation where that doesn't matter to us.
But, you know, again, if I could make it right, every woman should be able to have gold standard, but the resources aren't there to do that. Why? Well, I don't know. You know, that's a bigger question than I can answer. But you know, and it shouldn't matter whether you go to this hospital, or that hospital. It should be the same.
You should get the same piece of equipment, with the same qualification of person, doing the same test under the same conditions, looking for the same things. And that it should be followed up. That it shouldn't be reliant on the mother to come back and tell them what happened. That they should be able to track it, and the data should be shared through all sonographers, through the whole of the country, to make sure that, you know, that the risk factors that they give you aren't risk factors from 10 years ago. They're risk factors from last week, because it changes all the time. |
