Prenatal Testing at Advanced Maternal Age: Biomedical Routinization and Perceptions of Risk

• In Event: Reproductive Subversion Reconsidered: Contemporary Politics of Reproductive Knowledge

Abstract

Feminist scholars of science, technology, and medicine have critically analyzed the social processes that produce the routinization of prenatal testing in the biomedical management of pregnancy-related risk for decades. Much of this work has focused on invasive prenatal diagnostic testing (i.e., chorionic villus sampling (CVS) and amniocentesis). Recently, attention has turned to non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT), which has been available in the United States since 2011. Although NIPT is a screening test rather than a diagnostic test, its efficacy at predicting both fetal aneuploidy and fetal sex has transformed the landscape of prenatal care over the past decade. Using semi-structured interviews with 65 women who had a first births at age 35 or older in the United States, this study expands upon the burgeoning feminist sociological and science and technology studies scholarship on prenatal testing to explore how the routinization of NIPT among pregnant people of advanced maternal age shapes their perceptions of their testing experiences and the biomedical risks associated with their pregnancies.

Author

• Emily S. Mann, University of South Carolina-Columbia