Can doctors tell if a baby is going to be mentally and/or physically disabled before it is born?

Do you know how early in the pregnany they can tell?

No, not always. They can sometimes pick stuff up through ultrasound,there are also other procedures which they can perform to determine it, best would be if you are pregnant to ask your doctor.

yes, through ultrasound or an amniocentisis

Not mentally, but physically possibly. Most times if the baby has mental problems, you find out in the later stages of life through development of talking and thinking. It’s very rare to find out sooner unless you sense something’s wrong and get a head CT scan or something. Other than that, if you think something’s wrong; monitor your baby through the toddler or even later, younger stages of life. Keep track of when the baby learns new things, begins to walk & talk, etc. Things like that.

no not always doctors sometimes can

Sometimes yes. There are several ways. The ultrasound can tell whether all important parts of the body are there.

It can also hint at whether the baby might have the trisomy 23 (downs syndrome). They usually have elongated neck bones at some time of their development. If those hints exists they usually do a amniocentesis. Which means that the doctor puts a needle into your uterus and takes some of the liquid from the uterus. Then they can do a genetic analysis in a laboratory to determine any genetic faults in the baby.

But there are several disabilities that cannot be detected in an unborn. Sometimes they can not tell before the child is showing development deficiencies at 2 or 3 years. And there are many disabled children that have their disability because they didn’t get enough oxygen during birth. There is of course no way to diagnose that before birth as the child is completely healthy before birth. So there’s always a small chance to have a disabled child regardless of how many diagnoses they do on you.

The other problem with prenatal diagnostics is this: Now imagine you are in the 20th month of a pregnancy and you learn that your child will have downs syndrome. What do you do? There’s no way to cure it. So your choice is: have a disabled baby or abort. It’s not a choice that I would like to have. :-/

i think about 5-6 months!

Physically, through ultrasound. But it’s quite inaccurate unless the deformity/disability is quite grotesque. Amniocentesis could also be done.

In the far east, it has been a government protocol for a newborn [already born, though] to undergo NBST (NewBorn Screening Test). It’s a procedure that could accurately detect 6 genetic/metabolic disorders that WILL OCCUR on the baby’s lifetime. All they need are 6 drops of blood from the baby to detect Phenylketonuria (PKU), Congenital/chronic hypothyroidism (CH), Galactosemia (GAL), Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia (CAH), Glucose-6-Phosphate Dehydrogenase (G6PD) Deficiency, and sickle cell disease (SS). Those are, of course, done after birth.

Yes. And my friend said when they did the examine on her the doctor said the baby was going to have a down syndrom and they have to get some blood or tissues ( im not sure which one) from the baby and in order to do that they have to stick a big needle in the middle of your stomach. and when they did that to my friend the doctor didnt know what he was doing and popped the bag the baby was in and she had a miscarriage.