Challenges and Ethical Issues Surrounding Noninvasive Prenatal Screening (NIPS)

Noninvasive prenatal screening (NIPS) is nowadays a standard of prenatal care in many countries, even though having been introduced only ~10 years ago. Due to its fast inclusion in decades-old, well-established prenatal care schedules, gynecologists, and obstetricians, as well as the public, still struggle with understanding possibilities, benefits, and shortcuts of NIPS. The major challenge of NIPS is that well-founded training of specialists and independent, unbiased information on NIPS to pregnant women and their families is yet hard to access and often not properly provided. Misunderstandings are frequent, such as the suggestion of families receiving a negative test result, that this finding would be equivalent to “The baby you are expecting will be healthy!”. Thus, after a short introduction, this chapter first deals with the advantages and shortcuts of NIPS. If consumers of NIPS would know the latter in detail, this would avoid many challenges being due to wrong expectations and suggestions on the abilities of the test. Afterward ethical aspects of NIPS are discussed before all data and arguments presented will lead to the conclusion that NIPS is a promising tool for prenatal care but still needs to find its evidence-based place in the chorus of other prenatal care applications.