Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
understood against the backdrop of cultural understandings of the scan as
a 'routine' procedure in antenatal care (which of course raises problems
concerning informed consent). They struggle to understand the high risk
information, and try to grasp the risk fi gure they are given as high or low by
inquiring into how the fi gure is calculated and the divide between the normal
and the not normal. But most of all they try to understand the risk by making
it more concrete and possible to compare with other phenomena or situations
in their life-worlds. Similar 'strategies' to understand risk information have
been demonstrated in other studies of screening or genetic predictive testing
where people are presented with a risk fi gure (Parsons and Atkinson 1992;
Adelswärd and Sachs 1996; Olin Lauritzen and Sachs 2001). Here, however,
the risk fi gure is not related to the bodies of those receiving the information,
as in most types of screening, but to the baby they are carrying. The women's
elaborate accounts of the diffi culties in understanding the risk score, and as
they say 'thinking rationally', can also be understood within the context of
the early phase of the pregnancy they are in, when the baby is something
'new' that has to be understood and integrated into their lives.
Thinking about the baby as normal
As we have seen, the women refl ect on their own thinking concerning the risk
score. They try to think in a particular way, for instance to think positively,
or they try not to think, which is also typical for how they talk about the
baby. Here, different patterns can be found in the material. Some women
talk more elaborately about how they try hard to think 'positively', to
think
about the baby as healthy
, others talk about not being able to think anything
else than about the baby as
ill or disabled
. The women also argue that they
try
not
to think at all. Typically, the women oscillate between different future
scenarios, of becoming a mother of a healthy child or a child with Down
syndrome, including also the scenario of a termination of the pregnancy.
Trying to sustain an image of a healthy baby
The 'positive' thinking could for instance be expressed as wishing they could
think about the image from the ultrasound scan as a healthy baby. We will
here look into the case of Cecilia (aged 28, risk score 1:227) to illustrate
this line of argument. Cecilia wishes she could think 'of the lovely brain and
everything that looked so good' at the ultrasound examination. But this is
not so easy. Unfortunately she thinks more about the information she and
her husband had, and all the images of children that passed through her
head, or of 'how I as a parent am going to cope with the situation if it is a
Down syndrome and what it means'. She oscillates between thinking of the
baby as healthy and as a baby with Down syndrome:
