Prenatal Testing
Prenatal testing should be made mandatory, as there are many issues that the mother needs to understand before she is due to deliver. The testing is meant to benefit both the mother and the child. The unborn child might be having life-threatening conditions and congenital diseases such as Down Syndrome (Beksac et al., 2018). These genetic malfunctions tend to severely limit the quality of life of the child and the mother. There are also some conditions of the mother such as susceptibility to hypertension when pregnant that would endanger the lives of the mother and unborn child (Beksac et al., 2018). When such risk factors are identified in time, medical practitioners are in a position to intervene appropriately.
Counselling is necessary to prepare the mothers in the event of a congenital disease having been identified. The mothers are advised on how to care for the special needs’ infants that will result from the pregnancy. The changes of lifestyle in the present coupled with pollution has made the occurrence of congenital defects more common (Gekas et al., 2016). Also, there are some families that are prone to some genetic disorders given the history of the older relatives of the mother or father.
Prenatal testing and counselling provide the parents of the unborn kids with the skills essential for taking care of the infant incase there are abnormalities. The discovery of congenital or fatal conditions provide the parents to be with the choice of either terminating the pregnancy or taking it to term (Gekas et al., 2016). In conclusion, mandatory prenatal testing and counselling provides public health authorities with necessary data to come up with policies to care for the mothers and infants. It also helps in finding relevant information about the state of health of the population and future projections of the same.
References
Beksac, M. S., Tanacan, A., Duygu, A. H., Orgul, G., Soyak, B., Burcu, B. H., . . . Topaloğlu, H. (2018). Gestational outcomes of pregnant women who have had invasive prenatal testing for the prenatal diagnosis of duchenne muscular dystrophy. Journal of Pregnancy, 2018, 5. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2018/9718316
Gekas, J., Langlois, S., Ravitsky, V., Audibert, F., David Gardus van, d. B., Haidar, H., & Rousseau, F. (2016). Non-invasive prenatal testing for fetal chromosome abnormalities: Review of clinical and ethical issues. The Application of Clinical Genetics, 9, 15-26. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.2147/TACG.S85361