"Expectant parents experience feelings of anticipation, curiosity about foetal development, and a desire for reassurance and certainty during pregnancy. new prenatal genetic tests, often collected via minimally invasive methods, can provide large amounts of data or information about a foetus. Not all of what is gathered can be translated into meaningful knowledge, or will be useful for parents in making autonomous decisions about their pregnancy. There is a possibility that too much information can contribute to feelings of anxiety, beget more testing, or lead to invasive procedures in the pursuit of certainty.
In an attempt to alleviate the impact of this ethical concern, current practice in prenatal genomics relies heavily on the practice of acquiring informed consent from parents, implicitly marking it as a fundamental ethical standard. While informed consent is necessary for any testing procedure, it has epistemic boundaries in the context of prenatal genomics. Enhancing informed consent procedures will not address the root concern that expectant parents will often consent to undergo testing driven by a desire for reassurance, without reflecting on the information they expect to gain, the reasons why they want this information, and what they would do if they received a high-chance result for a genetic condition. This lack of reflection cannot be remedied by access to more information. We ought not characterise the decision to undergo prenatal genetic testing as merely medical. Expectant parents are, in a sense, consenting to know aspects of foetal development, and this knowledge may change the course of their pregnancy. The decision to test is medical, but also personal and moral. There is a temporal aspect specific to pregnancy as people have a short time to decide whether testing suits them, and look forward into an envisaged future with their child."