Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if he will consider conducting a consultation on the ethical implications of non-invasive prenatal testing.

Following the United Kingdom National Screening Committee’s (UK NSC’s) recommendation to evaluate the introduction of non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT) as a contingent test into the NHS Fetal Anomaly Screening Programme (FASP), the Nuffield Council on Bioethics undertook a considerable amount of work on bioethics particularly related to the addition of NIPT into the NHS FASP screening pathway.

The Council published a report in March 2017 which looked at the ethical, legal and regulatory implications of recent and potential future developments in NIPT. Their work included a consultation of views on offering screening for Down’s syndrome which was carried out with a small group of people from the Down’s syndrome community supported by the learning disability charity Mencap.

The UK NSC acknowledged the importance of the ethical considerations of screening and has set up an ethics task group to provide further scrutiny and advice to the committee.