A prenatal analysis does not measure illness or disability itself. Many prenatal tests, however, leave great ambiguity as to how severely the detected condition will affect the child. Not comprehensive . Testing can often pick out potentially serious diseases very accurately, but these laboratory techniques are not foolproof. They cannot rule out all potential birth defects, or even most of them.
False negatives are possible - and false positives sometimes happen as well.
The parents of the great majority of children born with genetic conditions had no known risk factors. Limited options . Usually, the only choice offered by prenatal testing is whether or not to abort. For most genetic diseases and disabilities that can be diagnosed prenatally, neither therapy nor cure is available. At the same time, the knowledge that a child will have a genetic disease can be very important to parents who decide to go ahead with the birth.