Dobbs decision is a huge setback for genetic counseling and the people who need it
By Sonia M. Suter and Laura Hercher,
STAT
| 08. 25. 2022
The Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that struck down the constitutional right to abortion guaranteed by Roe v. Wade in 1973 is also a huge setback for genetic counseling and the people who need it.
In 2013, when anti-abortion activists were still forced to maneuver around Roe v. Wade, North Dakota passed a law banning abortions that are motivated by diagnosis of a “genetic abnormality or potential for a genetic abnormality.” With this, and similar laws passed in 13 other states, the anti-abortion movement put itself forward as a champion of those with genetic conditions — though these states are among the least active in providing support for families and children in need of social services and medical care.
In a 2019 Supreme Court decision, Justice Clarence Thomas praised such laws as appropriate antidotes to “modern-day eugenics.” By allowing states to ban all abortions, including so-called eugenic abortions — which Thomas described as abortions that “eliminate children with unwanted characteristics, such as a particular sex or disability” — the Dobbs decision is likely to end...
Related Articles
By Abby McCloskey, The Dallas Morning News | 10.10.2025
We Texans like to do things our way — leave some hide on the fence rather than stay corralled, as goes a line in Wallace O. Chariton’s Texas dictionary This Dog’ll Hunt. Lately, I’ve been wondering what this ethos...
Paula Amato & Shoukhrat Mitalipov
[OHSU News/Christine Torres Hicks]
On September 30th, a team of 21 scientists from Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) published a significant paper in Nature Communications, with a scientifically accurate but, to many, somewhat abstruse headline:
Induction of experimental cell division to generate cells with reduced chromosome ploidy
The lead authors were Shoukhrat Mitalipov, recently described here as “a push-the-envelope biologist,” and his long-term colleague Paula Amato. (Recall that in July the pair had co-published with...
By Julia Black, MIT Technology Review | 10.16.2025
Consider, if you will, the translucent blob in the eye of a microscope: a human blastocyst, the biological specimen that emerges just five days or so after a fateful encounter between egg and sperm. This bundle of cells, about the size of...
By Lizzy Lawrence, Stat News | 10.14.2025