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Prenatal screening and pregnant women's attitudes toward the abortion of defective fetuses.

R R Faden, A J Chwalow, K Quaid, G A Chase, C Lopes, C O Leonard and N A Holtzman

We studied the attitudes of 490 pregnant women toward the abortion of defective fetuses. Three hundred of these women were participating in a prenatal screening program for neural tube defects. Although theoretical accounts of the effects of behavior on attitude would suggest that participation in a screening program would affect abortion attitudes, evidence in support of such an association was weak. The overwhelming majority of women, regardless of whether they had participated in the screening program, believed that women are justified in having an abortion in the face of fetal abnormality. There was a sharp increase in the number of screening program participants who said they would have an abortion when the probability of the fetus being affected with a neural tube defect rose from 95 per cent to 100 per cent.