The Pros and Cons of Genetic Screening

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The goal of genetic screening is to provide information for parents who have a high risk of having a child with a disability. These parents make decisions on issues, which include the management of genetic illnesses, conditions and procedures for conception and pregnancy termination. Genetic screening in terms of discovering that a woman is carrying a baby with a disability and the women has an option of carrying the pregnancy to term or terminating it, would bring up the issue of abortion. However, the issue is not terminating a pregnancy, the issue is, should these types of information be given to parents knowing that there is good chance the end result would be to have an abortion. Some might say genetic screening is unethical because it is predicting that a fetus is carrying a disability gene and because of this gene this fetus should not have the right to live. This is the same as saying handicapped people should have never been born, some might say. On the other hand genetic screening will not only provide us with genetic knowledge of a fetus before it is born but it will also tell us whether the fetus will be able to have a well functioned life.

Normally, parents are aware that they might have a risk of having a baby with a genetic disability or disease and they usually seek advice from genetic counselors. Genetic counselors can assist parents in decisions about predictive testing, which can identify if a fetus has one or more altered genes when the effects do not typically appear until later in life. There are two types of predictive testing: presymptomatic tests and susceptibility tests. Before suggesting that clients do presymptomatic testing, the genetic counselor prepares their clients to accept the test results. ...

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