Ethical Issues With Prenatal Genetic Testing

The main issues at hand in the readings for this week has to do with prenatal genetic testing and artificial reproductive technology (ART) and whether it is socially, ethically, and morally right to use these modern technologies to determine the course of a pregnancy. One of the first issues presented in these readings is whether or not selective abortion should be allowed due to results of prenatal genetic testing. One issue related to this is about the two most common types of prenatal genetic testing: amniocentesis and chorionic villus sampling (CVS). Amniocentesis is a commonly done prenatal genetic screening done at about the 15th or 16th week of gestation to find genetic or chromosomal abnormalities; however results from the test are

534), fetuses are living beings that have at least some moral claim on us, as a society, to not do them harm and therefore if a women wants to have an abortion there must be some type of justification for destroying the fetus. Prenatal genetic screening tests can determine if a fetus may be born with a genetic disease. The idea behind prenatal genetic screening tests is that a woman can decide to have a selective abortion if the test determines that the child she is carrying has the genes related to a particular disease (ex. Huntington’s disease, hemophilia, sickle cell anemia, etc.) On one side, this may be a positive idea since it can prevent genetic diseases, eliminate suffering in families, preservation of precious financial and medical resources, and the protection of genetic heritage (Kass, p. 534). Purdy, however, states that some couples should not reproduce due to the high risk that they will have a baby with a genetic disease that could greatly reduce the child’s quality of life (her example was children born with Huntington’s disease)(Purdy, p. 539). She goes on to say that it may be considered immoral to conceive children when there is a large risk that the child will have a genetic disease that will greatly decrease the child’s quality of life, regardless if they want to use prenatal genetic testing or not. Kass on the other hand states the problem with this is technology is that it makes the statement that “defectives should not be born”

PGD could potentially be used for both medical and non-medical purposes. Medical purpose for the use of PGD can include checking for inheritable diseases before implantation or ensuring that the fetus will be a HLA match to a sibling that is already born (Robertson, pg. 590-591). Non-medical uses can potentially in the future control the fetus’ gender, intelligence, hair color, eye color, memory, beauty, etc. (Robertson, p. 591). Today, the only non-medical use is for identifying the gender of the fetus before implantation; however, this brings up the topic of sexism. With use of this technology a person can decide not to implant a fetus simply due to the fetus’ gender. This is a problem because in many places male gender is preferred, especially for the first born child, because the male has always been known as the heir to the family. In the future, this technology may be an even bigger problem in that it could potentially create “designer babies”. The parents could pick and choose desirable traits before the pregnancy starts. Due to this the changes of abortion would be lessened because the parents would know that their child would be like before it was born. But it could also lead to other problems, such as certain traits becoming more desired that others. This brings up the ideas from Nazi Germany and the belief that only certain traits are desirable