State Intervention in Couples’ Reproductive Decisions: Socioethical Reflections Based on the Practice of Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis in France

Bouffard C, JK Godin & B Bévière (2010), “State intervention in Couples’ Reproductive Decisions: Socioethical Reflections Based on the Practice of Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis in France”, American journal of bioethics — Primary Research, 1(3): 12–30.

Because preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) involves in vitro human embryo creation, manipulation, genetic test- ing, and selection, it poses a challenge to certain values that underlie some of the West’s oldest social institutions. For example, PGD can represent a challenge to certain issues associated with the family: the traditional form taken by the family, modes of reproduction, and the transmission of certain genetic characteristics. PGD also conflicts with reli- gious doctrines about the sacredness of the human embryo and the redemptive role of suffering (Schenker 2005; Jones and Whitaker 2009; Zivotofsky and Jotkowitz 2009). Medi- cally, it is important to bear in mind that, at the beginning of the 1990s, PGD became the first reprogenetic practice1 to

be transferred to a clinical setting. Since that time, because it underlies diagnostic and therapeutic approaches that re- quire the use of the human embryo, it has been playing a precursor role that goes beyond the fields of antenatal ge- netic testing and assisted reproductive technology (ART), extending to epigenetics and the fields of predictive, regen- erative, and transformative medicine. 

 

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