Thanks, Inanna
And right back at you. I wholeheartedly agree with you on the 2 sides to every medical advance. Just like all drugs have side effects, so do technologies like u/s, fetal monitoring, etc. That is why I am against the idea of routine anything. I think we should look at everything we do, be it taking medication, vaccination, diagnosing/screening tools, look into them and then weigh up the pros and cons and base our decisions on that. We might decide that we want to go with the suggested schedule or we might not. But just because that's the way it is done, is not a good enough reason FOR ME.
For example: With DS, I declined the 12 week u/s because I was low risk and didn't want to have to act on any information I might have found out. Hence, I would not have gained anything valuable from the u/s. In this case, the "procedure" was not warranted. I did however agree to the 20 week u/s as I wanted to make sure my placenta was out of the way. Here I could find out information that was valuable to me, so I deemed it worth the risk. I did then have to have another u/s late in my pregnancy which showed the placenta had moved out of the way. Again, the result justified the risk.

Sorry, this was totally on a tangent...