ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how Down's syndrome screening is downgraded in different but interrelated ways by identifying two ways in which screening for Down's syndrome is further sedimented as a routine part of prenatal care. By focusing on how professionals draw on discursive grounds and rules to legitimate and 'account' for their conduct, it also explains how this rhetoric is used by professionals to quash their own concerns and unease with screening. The chapter identifies how 'informed choice' (or 'informed consent') and 'non-directive care', transposable discourses infiltrating Down's syndrome screening and prenatal care more generally, are enacted in the clinic and what this accomplishes. The accuracy of the screening test is an important point. It also identifies a tension in the accounts of professionals: they express ambiguities and anxieties about screening yet spend much of their day aligning with principles of informed choice and non-directive care, discourses that have constituted key principles of prenatal care for a prolonged period.
