Antenatal means ‘about the medical care a woman gets while she is pregnant, before the baby is born’. Antenatal clinic, antenatal class, antenatal appointment: these are the visits, tests, and classes that check the mother and the baby-to-be. It is a calm hospital word, not slang and not an emotion-word. This is the usual term in British English and in a lot of the medical English Taiwan students meet in textbooks. In American English the same idea is almost always prenatal. Both are ‘before’ + natal (‘of birth’). It is about the time before birth. After the baby arrives, the matching word is postnatal (US also postpartum for the mother’s recovery). It is not about the baby’s name, and natal here is not nation.