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Genetic Sceening of Prospective Parents and of Workers

Some Scientific and Social Issues

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Biomedical Ethics Reviews · 1984

Part of the book series: Biomedical Ethics Reviews ((BER))

Abstract

Screening apparently healthy people for potential diseases―their own or those of their future offspring―is quite different from treating people who have overt health problems. Whether and under what circumstances to screen healthy individuals are social questions that go beyond issues of scientific and technical feasibility. Few would deny that to gain deeper insight into one’s health status can be beneficial, especially if there is something one can do to prevent one’s health from deteriorating. On the other hand, screening procedures often raise ethical issues since they invade the privacy of healthy people. And if they are technically complicated and yield answers that are difficult for people to understand who do not have a certain amount of scientific training and social sophistication, they tend to inform the person or agency who screens more than they do those who are screened. In a society like ours, in which power and knowledge are not equally distributed among all segments of the population, but in which, on the contrary, physicians are more powerful than the great majority of their patients―and not just because they know more about disease, but because they usually are members of a more privileged race, class, and sex―preventive screening lends itself to coercion and is not an unmixed blessing.

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Notes and References

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  97. These recommendations were made by the Canadian Advisory Council on the Status of Women in their position paper on “Reproductive Health Hazards in the Workplace, 1980.” The position paper can be obtained by writing to the Council, Box 1541, Station B, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.

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  101. We have put quotation marks around the words, “genes” and “environments” because they tend to be used to sum up a pattern of thinking that represents an entire philosophy. For example, “gene” stands for a variety of concepts of which the biochemical notion of double-helical strands of DNA is only one. Most of the time when people (including some respected scientists) speak of genes, they are merely using short-hand for a capacity or trait that they believe to be inherited, though they usually have no way of knowing that it is. Similarly, “environment” is used to underline something external, not intrinsic. Yet, the very notion of the “environment” as something distinct from the organism is absurd. People, like all organisms, are quite literally part of the world around us, and the “environment” is part of us. We constantly interact with it (by breathing or eating it, sweating or excreting into it, moving in it, and so forth), just as it constantly interacts with us. The concepts of gene and environment are useful, but we must bear in mind that we usually use them not to describe what goes on in the world, but to make it easier to understand by oversimplifying it.

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  1. Ruth Hubbard
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  2. Mary Sue Henifin
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  1. Georgia State University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA

    James M. Humber  & Robert T. Almeder  & 

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Hubbard, R., Henifin, M.S. (1984). Genetic Sceening of Prospective Parents and of Workers. In: Humber, J.M., Almeder, R.T. (eds) Biomedical Ethics Reviews · 1984. Biomedical Ethics Reviews. Humana Press, Totowa, NJ. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-59259-440-5_4

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