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The development of prenatal tests has brought about profound changes in the health of pregnant women and their families in various ways. This study aims to find out the subjectivity of prenatal tests recognized by nursing students, and classify them into different types, and provide them as basic sources for developing educational programs on those students on prenatal tests. This study used Q methodology to develop the data. Fourteen nursing students of A university were told to classify 40 statements about prenatal tests. The collected data was analyzed using the QUANL PC Program. The nursing students' perception of prenatal tests was classified into two factors. The subjectivity types of prenatal tests were 'Type of regarding the strengths of prenatal tests as important' and 'Type of defending subjects as a nurse'. In the results of analyzing the subjectivity of prenatal tests, there were two factors, which explained 26.99% of total variance such as 17.12% for Factor 1 and 9.87% for Factor 2. The Factor 1 could be regarded as the factor that explains the perception of prenatal tests the most. Among 14 research subjects, eight subjects belonged to Factor 1 while six subjects belonged to Factor 2. This study provided the basic data for understanding and educating the clinical nurses' perception of prenatal tests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the internet has become a popular medium for pregnant women seeking pregnancy-related information (Gao et al., 2012; Lagan, Sinclair & Kernohan, 2010; Romano, 2007; Song, West, Lundy & Smith-Dahmen, 2012). This study which utilized a qualitative approach explores Israeli women's online information seeking during pregnancy. Israel is an especially interesting and important case study for exploring pregnancy-related internet use, because Israel has the highest rate of prenatal testing in the world (Lavi, 2010). The findings of this study indicated that the most prominent type of information sought by Israeli pregnant women online was focused on prenatal tests. The internet as a source of pregnancy-related information seems to function not just as a means to fulfill personal informational needs, but also to represent a broader social phenomenon of a highly medicalized pregnancy that seem to intensify uncertainty and therefore, to increase the need to rely on the internet during pregnancy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A wide array of biomedical and genetic technologies is becoming available in both developed and developing nations. This situation is the cause of growing concern for health policy makers who must evaluate the utility of these technologies for their inclusion in public health insurance programs. Ideally, policy makers would have the information necessary to rationally allocate scarce resources, prioritise technologies, and ensure fair access to necessary health care services. The reality, however, is that policy makers often do not have such information. In this paper, we argue that the field of Health Technology Assessment (HTA), through the integration of ethical analyses (i.e., an "ethical HTA"), can enable Argentinean and other Latin American policy makers to better understand the soco-ethical concerns raised by new biotechnologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Noninvasive prenatal screening tests help identify genetic disorders in a fetus, but their take-up remains low in several countries. Using a regression discontinuity design, we test the causal effect of a policy that eliminated co-payments for noninvasive screening tests in Italy. We identify the treatment effects by a discontinuity in women's eligibility for a free test based on their conception date. We find that the policy increases the probability of women's undergoing noninvasive screening tests by 5.5 percentage points, and the effect varies by socioeconomic status. We do not find evidence of substitution effects with more expensive and riskier invasive diagnostic tests. In addition, the increase in take-up does not affect pregnancy termination or newborn health. We find some evidence of positive effects on mothers' health behaviors during pregnancy as measured by reductions in mothers' weight gain and hospital admissions during pregnancy, but these are statistically significant only at the 10 percent level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]