Excerpts from “The Other Scarlet ‘A’: Abortion’s Relationship to Genetic Testing” from THE GENE MACHINE by Bonnie Rochman.
When the second purple line appeared on the white plastic wand on a March morning in 2002, I knew next to nothing about pregnancy and even less about raising a child. It was years before I’d go on to cover parenting and pediatrics, and write about sequencing children’s genomes. Yet from the first days of that pregnancy, I was already enmeshed in the most cutting-edge technologies of the time, thanks to my friend Tali, whose son was due a week after mine.
Tali had recently moved to my home state of North Carolina from Israel, where nuchal translucency testing was standard. I had no idea what it was, but I figured it was important, judging by her level of outrage that this test to gauge Down syndrome risk — combination of an ultrasound to measure the collection of fluid under the skin on the back of a fetus’s neck, and a blood draw — wasn’t commonly available in the United States. Within days, she told me...
By Liz Baker, Debbie Elliott, and Susanna Capelouto, NPR | 03.06.2024
Aggregated News
The Alabama State Legislature passed a bill Wednesday night granting civil and criminal immunity for in vitro fertilization service providers and receivers.
Republican Governor Kay Iveysigned the bill into law within an hour of it passing the Alabama...
By Daniel Gilbert, The Washington Post | 03.07.2024
Aggregated News
Vitaly Kushnir’s fertility clinic offers to screen an embryo to predict a baby’s sex, but the service can lead to ethically murky territory, like when a couple wanted it so their first child could be a boy.
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