Essay On Genetic Discrimination

835 Words2 Pages

Clay Bradshaw
Thompson
English 3-AP
24 February, 2014
Genetic Discrimination in the Hiring Process
In recent years, medical advances have enabled doctors to access our genetic code so that people may be aware as to what diseases they are most likely to be diagnosed with in the future. This is based on a person’s family genetic history which makes it easier to confirm from someone’s genetic code, when the doctors have data to compare results to. Meaning, if a patient’s grandmother had heart disease they would be susceptible to heart disease as well since genetics are passed down from generation to generation. Some employers have taken to getting potential employees tested for this reason. “Every person has dozens of DNA differences” making genetic discrimination slightly hypocritical, due to the possibility that someone who is being insulted could share a close genetic code with the person doing the discrimination (Genetic Information N). Although genetic testing can give valuable information about a person’s health condition, employers shouldn’t consider a possible employee’s genetic information as a viable excuse to not hire them because not only is genetic information based on other people’s results and it doesn’t insure that a person has, or will have, a given condition, but they won’t even consider an employee’s skill set or potential after they learn of the results.
Genetic discrimination has been illegal since November 21, 2009 when the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, or GINA, took effect. During the ratification process, Congress almost whole heartedly accepted it since “the House of Representatives supported it 414-1, and the Senate backed it unanimously” during the voting of the bill (Cohen). The specific par...

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...compensated, and now Fabricut is required to post “anti-discrimination notice[s] to employees” to prevent future cases like this within this company (Fabricut).
While genetic discrimination isn’t a big deal at the moment, it is projected to grow exponentially over the next few years since companies have access to these sources. “Genes are a classic immutable characteristic”, similar to skin color, sex, and race (Cohen). Granted it isn’t technically a visible trait like those three examples, genetic structure makes up who you are. It makes up a person’s skin color. It makes up a person’s sex. These unchangeable characteristics are all sources of discrimination, for it makes someone different from everyone else. Since most humans don’t like change, they don’t like things that are different. People just have to learn to accept people for who they are, genetics and all.

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