Non-Invasive Prenatal Testing: Is This the Brave New World We Want?
By Alexandra Minna Stern,
The Huffington Post
| 12. 11. 2012
Over the past year, several companies have unveiled non-invasive prenatal tests designed to detect certain genetic conditions by analyzing fragments of fetal DNA contained in a pregnant woman's blood. Unlike the genetic screening currently offered to women early in pregnancy, which is used to calculate the fetus's
risk of developing a particular genetic disorder, non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT) is diagnostic, and can tell an expectant mother with an extremely high level of accuracy whether or not her fetus actually has trisomy 21 (Down syndrome), trisomy 18 (Edwards syndrome), or trisomy 13 (Patau syndrome). Endorsed for use among "high-risk" women by the National Society of Genetic Counselors (NSGC), NIPT can obviate the need for amniocentesis or chorionic villus sampling (CVS), both of which are invasive and pose a small risk to the expectant mother and/or fetus.
The comprehensive roll out of NIPT would result
in testing for trisomies among a considerable number of the approximately 5 million American women who become pregnant each year, not just the much smaller sub-set of women who undergo amniocentesis or CVS. NIPT has the potential...
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Sir Francis Galton, 1890s, by Eveleen Myers (née Tennant)
npg.org
Public Domain via Wikipedia
As has been discussed in recent issues of Biopolitical Times (1, 2), there are, increasingly, companies that claim to be selling parents better babies by selecting the “best” embryos. These services don’t come cheap – think $50,000, or even more, for embryo testing, plus perhaps as much again for IVF and concomitant services. To most of us, that is extremely expensive...
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Designer babies are coming soon to an IVF clinic near you.
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