‘Diseases’, ‘Defects’, ‘Abnormalities’, and ‘Conditions’: Discursive Tensions in Prenatal Screening

Abstract

Pregnant women in many industrialised countries are now offered the opportunity to receive a prenatal screening test for disability, and asked to make an informed decision about whether or not they wish to engage in this testing process, which may lead to future decisions about invasive diagnostic testing and pregnancy termination. In this chapter we examine the way in which choice is discursively constructed in the context of prenatal screening, contending that the terms used to describe prenatal screening and disability may have the effect of enabling certain courses of action and discouraging others, even when the test is offered under the guise of increasing individual choice.