Mr. Peter Thompson:

The post mortem provides her with two opportunities. People often want a reason why something has happened. This gives an opportunity to close that chapter and allow people to move on. That is very important. Information can be difficult to hear sometimes but often it is better to have the information. The second point is that if a woman hears this story, and how bad it is, it is quite distressing because she has lost her baby but she wants to know whether it is going to happen again. We might be able to do the post mortem and say there is a 1:1000 chance this will happen again or we might find other differences in the baby as well. That means that it would appear the baby has a syndrome and that syndrome has a higher recurrence risk, a 1:4 chance. People will view those two facts very differently and can make decisions about their future reproductive life in the knowledge of what is there. In the service here this is a time when ultrasound scanning could be directed at a much higher risk group.