1. Prenatal testing and genetics
Week 20 Sociology of Human Reproduction

2. Recap Considered the family as a social construction
Considered the concept of ‘good motherhood’ and stigma associated with teenage pregnancy
Considered pregnancy and breastfeeding

3. Outline Look at the issue of prenatal screening during pregnancy
Consider the interrelationship between medical technologies and social understandings
Considered disability rights critique

4. Introduction to Testing
Many forms of testing around reproduction
Tests prior to conception (genetic counselling)
Tests on developing embryos (PGD)
Tests during pregnancy (antenatal care)

5. Tests prior to pregnancy
Genetic Carrier Testing looks at inherited conditions
Cystic Fibrosis
Linked to a faulty gene, if both parents carriers
¼ chance of baby with CF
Huntington's Disease
Linked to a faulty gene, each child has a 50/50 chance of inheriting the fatal gene. Everyone who carries the gene will develop the disease.
Breast cancer
‘Cancer’ genes give a predisposition

6. Tests prior to pregnancy
If parents are identified as carriers, they can use Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis
Following IVF, an embryo is grown until it consists of eight cells. Cell(s) removed/tested and only ‘healthy’ embryos replaced

7. Tests during pregnancy
Antenatal Screening
Bblood serum testing, scans
Only gives a predictor of risk
Prenatal Diagnostic Testing
amniocentesis, chorionic villus sampling
Gives a definitive answer
Carries risk of miscarriage

8. What do you think about prenatal screening and genetic testing?
Is it a benign or problematic process?

9. Routinisation Testing during pregnancy can be said to be routinised
‘Optional’ tests become everyday practice
Screening interrelated with
social meaning of scanning

10. Feminist debates over testing
Some feminists argue that increased testing furthers women’s reproductive rights
Women are given more
control over their pregnancies
Women can ‘choose’ to know and make decisions based on the outcome

11. Feminist debates over testing
Others argue that women experience tests as disempowering
Furthers the medicalisation of pregnancy
Pregnancy becomes ‘tentative’
Social pressures to undergo testing and selective abortion?

12. Abortion law
1967 Abortion Act Amended in 1990, permits abortion up to 24 weeks
Exception ‘substantial risk’ of ‘physical or mental abnormalities’ which would mean ‘serious handicapped’
No definition on what constitutes a ‘serious handicap’

13. Do you think that prenatal testing could put pressure on women to choose abortion?

14. Disability Rights Responses
Testing is part of the process of discrimination against disabled people
Testing to for the right of selective abortion
Whose lives are valued
Selective termination of
disabled foetuses is eugenic

15. Disability Rights Responses
Practices of testing and selective abortion informed by medical model of disability
This focuses exclusively on impairment
and not on the way in which society
creates disability
To terminate on basis of impairment is to suggest that it s the only thing worth considering

16. Disability Rights Responses
“Disabled people are under threat for their existence in modern technological societies. Medical science feels able to flex its muscles and power to abolish all life where the unborn foetus may be imperfect or impaired”
(Rock, 1996: 112)
“The message at the heart of widespread selective abortion…is the greatest insult: some of us are “too flawed” in our very DNA to exist, we are unworthy of being born”
(Saxton, 1997: 391)

17. Disability Rights Response
Other disability activities challenge the eugenic position
Argue that it is overly simplistic
Wishing to prevent impairment is not necessarily an expression of prejudiced attitudes towards disability
Ignores the social context in which
decisions are made

18. Do you think that prenatal testing is a form of discrimination against people with disabilities?

19. Whose choice? Contrasting cases: Whittaker case (UK)
Parents wanted to use PGD to screen for an embryo to be a suitable match for a ill sibling
Permission was refused (outside legal remit)
Widespread public condemnation of the decision
Duchesneau & McCullough case (US)
Deaf parents used screening to ‘choose’ a deaf child
Widespread public condemnation

20. Pro-choice/ anti-discrimination?
Many who question prenatal testing are not anti-abortion
Do not want to restrict abortion, but to look at how these issues are considered
Question if current social structures ‘force’ women into a particular choice

21. Summary
Genetic and screening technologies are often seen as ‘scientific progress’
The development of technologies linked to societal values and social context
‘Choice’ is rarely a neutral issue