Risk and anxiety: Polyvalence of ethics in high-tech antenatal care

This paper is a case study on abortion problems engendered by the implementation of the advanced technology of fetal diagnosis and antenatal screening in Finnish maternity care. The analysis of the case focuses on 'ethical' concerns regarding high-tech reproductive medicine, which are seen as responses to controversies in medicine and public health care caused by the introduction of the new technology. The ethical concerns are articulated in three contexts: first, in the ethicalization of the problems of public health policy regarding antenatal screenings and fetal diagnosis in terms of general 'bioethics'; second, in the elementary ethical split that comes into being when the machinery of reproductive health care withdraws into a position of purely technical responsibility and leaves the choice, i.e. ethical responsibility, concerning any medical operation to the pregnant woman; and third, in the situation in which an individual woman is both free and compelled to give her 'informed consent' on the basis...