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Lincoln Samuel tested positive for Edwards syndrome, but was born perfectly healthy |
On Sunday of this week, the Boston Globe published an article that I’ve been waiting to see for months. It’s Beth Daley’s investigative report on noninvasive prenatal testing, and I’m hoping it will both create a larger public conversation, and shift the terms of the conversation so far.
I believe that it is not enough to consider reproductive technologies in the abstract. They cannot be contemplated only in a statistical or bioethical vacuum: we need fact-based stories to perceive human consequences on the ground. Beth’s article accomplishes this by focusing on the cost of false positives and false negatives in real people. She also delves into the facts about LDTs, or laboratory-developed tests, which are currently unregulated by the FDA. Because her article has already sparked pieces at The New York Times, NBC News, and elsewhere, I have hopes that a new conversation is beginning.
The views, opinions and positions expressed by these authors and blogs are theirs and do not necessarily represent that of the Bioethics Research Library and Kennedy Institute of Ethics or Georgetown University.