ABSTRACT
Pregnant women who attend antenatal ‘booking interviews’ for midwifery and obstetric care are presented with a series of choices. The main decision that a woman will make with her midwife or GP at this early meeting, usually around the twelfth week of pregnancy, is about place of birth. But women also have to make a series of choices throughout the antenatal period, which involves them in a complex process of decisionmaking that is both practical and ethical (Davis 1999; Ewart 2000; Holt 1996). The study findings were rich and diverse and there were many more factors involved in the decision making process than we had anticipated. Here we focus on just a few of these that form part of the context of decisions. We have restricted our discussion to just one screening test – that for Down’s syndrome.
