Some high-street clinics are putting lives at risk by allowing unqualified non-specialists to carry out pregnancy scans, an industry body has warned.
Demanding new regulation, the Society of Radiographers (SoR) said anyone using an ultrasound machine could currently call themselves a sonographer and offer the service to mothers-to-be.
The SoR said these unregulated scanning clinics sometimes offered “dangerous” advice. Pregnant women have been “incorrectly diagnosed with serious health conditions” or told that an “abnormality” meant they would need to end the pregnancy, “only to find that their baby was completely healthy”, according to the BBC.
A former hospital sonographer described a case where a private clinic wrongly told a woman that her eight-to-nine week pregnancy had no heartbeat and was severely malformed, leading her to be referred for an induced miscarriage. But during a follow-up NHS scan the baby was found to be “absolutely fine”, said The Independent.
The lack of regulation in the field means that “major foetal abnormalities” such as spina bifida or polycystic kidneys can be missed, while potentially life-threatening ectopic pregnancies, where the fertilised egg implants outside the womb, may not be picked up.
An SoR spokesperson said although there were some “really great” private scanning services with correctly trained staff, she was concerned about the growth of pop-up clinics in shopping centres and on high streets, which sell souvenir images or scans to reveal the baby’s sex.
Unregulated clinics are “making money out of maternal fears”, said Eva Wiseman in The Guardian. The fact that “it is now possible to witness, with your eyes, some proof of a future is seductive” and it’s “no surprise that private scanning businesses are multiplying”. | 
