ScienceDaily.com ran a press release yesterday on new research in the journal Sociology of Health and Illness which looks at reproductive responses of parents of children with genetic conditions or impairments. The study suggests that these parents “may avoid the need to choose whether to undergo pre-natal testing or to abort future pregnancies by simply avoiding subsequent pregnancy altogether.”

Parents are ‘choosing not to choose’, researcher Dr Susan Kelly, who is based at the Egenis research centre at the University of Exeter, suggests, in a ‘reflection of deep-seated ambivalence’ about the options and the limitations of new reproductive technologies.

According to ‘Choosing not to choose: reproductive responses of parents of children with genetic conditions or impairments’ published in the journal Sociology of Health and Illness, more than two-thirds of parents in the USA-based study chose not to have any more children rather than accepting tests to identify or avoid the birth of an affected child. Of the parents who did have further children, a majority chose not to make use of prenatal screening or testing.

The researchers note:

“The choices associated with prenatal screening and genetic testing practices … were for most parents shaped by a heightened sense of the risks inherent in reproduction and of the limits of medicine’s ability to predict and control them,” says Dr Kelly.

“Faced with this set of choices, many parents chose to avoid future reproduction. Many parents did not perceive the information they understood to be available from prenatal testing to be useful or relevant to their sense of responsibility and control. Experiencing the birth of an affected child for some parents exposed the limitations of medical knowledge and practice, and placed medicine alongside other forms of interpretation and evidence. Interventions such as genetic testing for many were associated with uncertainty and a loss of control for parents as responsible caretakers and decision makers.”

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