Some parents don’t want to know the sex of their upcoming child. Others do. DNA profiling has been a hot topic amongst scientists for years and this week the topic heats up even more as a few reports published last December are now appearing on the scientific grid months later. Included in the studies is news that doctors could essentially reconstruct a baby’s genetic makeup by recovering fragments of fetal DNA from the mother’s bloodstream and determine medical conditions like Down syndrome, but also things like eye color and height and even the risk for developing depression or Alzheimer’s disease and other ailments, leaving less to fate than ever before.
Marcy Darnovsky of the Center for Genetics and Society in Berkeley, California explains:
“This really changes the experience of what it will be like to be pregnant and have a child. I keep coming up with the word, game-changer.”
Jaime King, an associate professor at the University at California Hastings College of Law in San Francisco made the following comments:
“That’s a very big burden to place on would-be parents. At the moment these things happen, it’s just you there by yourself. Some people might like that level of control, but others would be happier to leave things up to chance a little more.”
The DNA of a fetus has long been recoverable through medical procedures, with a small risk of miscarriage. But a blood test would be free of that risk, which should make many more women interested in it and doctors willing to test for a wider range of conditions, some experts say. And the results could come early enough to allow for an abortion before the pregnancy is even obvious. There lies the controversy and a barrage of moral and political fire.
Dr. Brian Skotko, a board member of the National Down Syndrome Society comments:
“If no limitations are put on, you can have a couple get a prenatal genetic test in the future saying their fetus has … a 60% chance of having breast cancer at the age of 60 and a 30% chance of being gay. The ultimate question for society is what forms of human variation are valuable?”
Should a woman be allowed to get an abortion for any reason, even a trivial one like test results about height or eye color? Some state governments have passed laws outlawing abortions on the basis of sex, she said. But it’s not clear whether those are constitutional, and a woman might simply not reveal her true reasons for wanting the abortion, King said.
Skotko points out that people use their own personal perspective in deciding what they want for their children. Some couples who are deaf from a genetic condition already use current technology to avoid having children with normal hearing.
“It’s their lens by which they view the world, and they want a child who views the world through that same lens.”
A human embryo contains 46 chromosomes organized into 23 pairs: 22 pairs of non-sex chromosomes, called autosomes, and one pair of sex chromosomes (XX in a female and XY in a male). One chromosome in each pair is inherited from the mother and one from the father.
Located along these chromosomes are approximately 25,000 genes that carry instructions for making proteins. Through the proteins they encode, your genes determine how your body develops and functions.
Sources: The Genetic Disease Foundation and The Associated Press
Written by Sy Kraft