Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, how many women (a) accepted or (b) refused foetal anomaly screening in each of the last five years for which records are available.

The NHS Fetal Anomaly Screening Programme offers screening to all pregnant women in England to assess the risk of the baby being born with Down’s syndrome or a number of fetal anomalies (structural abnormalities with how the fetus has developed).

There is no current systematic collation of data at a national level of the uptake of screening for either Down’s syndrome or the 18⁺⁰-20⁺⁶ week (18-21 week) fetal anomaly scan.

The Down’s syndrome screening quality support service (DQASS) can provide data on the number of completed screening test that were undertaken for Down’s syndrome in the last five years and these are presented in the following table.