Professor Giuseppe Noia, Catholic University Sacro Cuore, Rome

Modern obstetric technology utilizes ultrasound technologies upon which all of prenatal diagnosis based. The methods utilized are invasive (echo-guided diagnostic and therapeutic procedures) and non-invasive (various applications of ultrasounds with TA probes and TV Doppler velocimetry, color and power color Doppler, three-dimensional ultrasonography).
An accurate evaluation of the impact of this technology on the mother-child interaction in prenatal life is fundamental.
This evaluation wishes to propose a scientifically founded cultural vision that takes into account the dynamic and strongly captivating aspect of the entire biunique relational transfer that exists between the mother and her child during the pregnancy. It is unthinkable that today the initiation and development of this interaction, with all of the relational shifts that doctors and the modern prenatal culture induce, should lack sufficient psychological and physical support.
The multiplication of risks and incorrect information figure into an anxiety-inducing and stressful gestational experience which is often the expression of the “perfect child syndrome.” In a cultural context in which the evaluation criteria hierarchically shift the value of “life” toward “quality of life,” such anxiety causing factors can lead to refusal. As has been previously indicated in publications, there is a direct sequence that induces strongly selective criteria, eliminates mother-child communication, creates anxiety and leads to refusal. On the basis of these premises, as is also expressed in related literature, the impact of fetal diagnosis and therapy technologies on the mother-child relationship has been analyzed.
The use of diagnostic techniques should serve to reinforce the beautiful experience of motherhood for the woman. It is important to enter into the mother-child relational dimension because we
know that there are women who detect the presence of their fetus even before a pregnancy test, and therefore serious consideration must also be given to that entire realm of perceptive events that women experience without being able to explain them. Assuming that the mother-child union embodies a biological and relational symbiosis, it is easy to intuit that a motherly decision of voluntary interruption (abortion) of her own malformed fetus constitutes a deep wound at a personal level. The use of technologies that lead to understanding her child’s real conditions of curable or incurable illnesses must absolutely be supported by professionals with psychotherapeutic depth (a gynecologist and psychotherapist for the prenatal period) who accompany the patient and the couple along the path of diagnosis.
A relevant aspect of all this concerns both the prenatal diagnosis of patients with therapeutic options, as well as the diagnosis of children with no therapeutic possibilities, defined as “terminal fetuses.” In these cases, there is always the possibility of psychological and human support and “accompaniment” of the terminal fetus. This is because in the dynamic of suffering that the couple must confront (the trauma of loss), the investment of all of their resources in a plan for “life in any event” (their child) can help assuage their letting go and facilitate the processing of the loss (the loss of trauma).
From all of this it may be seen that much can be done to oppose, with rigorously scientific and intensely human criteria, the culture of prenatal euthanasia in order to serve the family and society and restitute the true value of human dignity.