PRENATAL GENETIC TESTING
Do You Really Want to Know Your Baby's Future?

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Program Summary

Producer: Kathy McAnally
Aired Beginning: November 1998

Today, there are a variety of prenatal screening tools that prospective parents can use to look into their baby's future. With procedures from simple blood tests and non-invasive sonograms to more aggressive amniocentesis and CVS (chorionic villus sampling) tests, doctors can now predict some of our most serious hereditary diseases. Yet even if you performed every prenatal test available - a prohibitively expensive undertaking - only about 350 of the more than 4,000 known genetic disorders could be detected. Should medical science promote the availability of these tests?

This program offers a history, and description, of the newest prenatal genetic testing techniques, which - in the early years of their existence - doctors increasingly felt compelled to prescribe, to avoid possible malpractice litigation. This program explores beyond the issues of technology, law, and public policy, to the thoughts and feelings of women who have faced tough new decisions: First, whether to participate in genetic testing at all. Parents can go through great agony even in deciding not to test, especially in cases in which there's a known hereditary disease in their family. And second, how to respond to the sometimes devastating results received when testing is conducted. In this show, we'll hear from two women who underwent prenatal tests and received very different results - and learn how they decided what to do about it.

We'll look at how genetic testing affects us in specific social contexts, talking to mothers in an orthodox Jewish community about a Tay Sachs screening, and to low-income women at clinics in the rural South where the vast majority of women refuse to get prenatal testing. Then we'll return to the global view with a history of the eugenics movement. You'll hear some opponents voice their fears that today's prenatal testing could result in screening for traits other than diseases - after all, what is "normal"?. And we'll be introduced to the issue of short-statured parents seeking to have children who also have achondroplasia, or dwarfism.

As you listen to the program, expect provocative questions about the direction in which reproductive technologies may take us as they are refined and improved. Ethical dilemmas abound, and only an informed public - and informed public officials - will be able to make the wise decisions.

Last Updated: July 2004