When should a woman be able to find out her baby’s sex? And what should she be able to do with this information? In the latest instalment of What to Expect When Society Lays Expectations Upon You, to which Wide Awoke dutifully refers whenever anything pregnancy-related crowns its head, the Labour party is calling for a ban on pregnant women being told the sex of their baby after the early blood tests. Why? Because of a concern that some people may choose termination on the grounds of sex. Which is, quite rightly, illegal. The sex of a foetus is not a reason for termination; I think most human beings can agree on that.
Let’s delve deeper. Noninvasive Prenatal Testing (NIPT), now offered by the NHS to screen for genetic conditions including Down’s syndrome, can also determine a foetus’s sex from as early as 10 weeks. Parents cannot use NIPT to find out a baby’s sex unless they go private, and this appears to be happening more. A report last year warned that “permitting NIPT for sex determination in the UK may be encouraging sex selection”. The Labour MP Naz Shah said that a preference for boys in some cultures could force parents “to adopt methods such as NIPT to live up to expectations of family members”.
I took the NIPT test in 2017, paying for it before it was offered on the NHS (the only time in my life I have ever “gone private”). Why? Because my routine blood tests showed that my baby was high risk for Down’s syndrome. I chose to know more and opted for the least risky way of finding out.
When asked if I wanted to know the sex, I said yes. Because I’m nosy. If there is something knowable, particularly about my body, I want to know it. Others choose not to know, or to have no screening at all and that’s fine, too. Like feminism, most issues around pregnancy boil down to choice. And it’s worth noting that every time a test for pregnant women is rolled out, the standard response is to panic about an increase in terminations as opposed to rejoicing in an increase in women’s safety and choice.
On the other hand, it’s also the nature of capitalism (in addition to an NHS afflicted with deep cuts to maternity services) that more choice means more anxiety. If I’m honest, all that knowledge made for a more fretful pregnancy. This is something we need to address as more pregnant women are paying for extra private scans, and none of it is decreasing anxiety. Sometimes, it makes it worse. How a pregnant woman navigates all this is a deeply personal and individual matter. How we support her is a matter for all of us.
