The Reality of Planning Your Child
To preface this post, the research mentioned took place within the country of Australia, with another link from the NIH being used a reference material due to having wonderful infographics that are useful for understanding the other source material. The second research took place in Deutschland.
With the advent of genetic screening technology, prospective parents throughout the world are worried about the possibility of passing on unwanted traits, or genetic complications that they might not have previously known about. It can be risky for a child if both parents have a heterozygous allele of a recessively lethal gene, or a recessive gene that could have debilitating effects on a fetus or offspring in general. Researchers are currently looking at ways to bring genetic screening for couples from something a minority know about to a nation-wide practice. The greatest problem with that is creating a positive view of the process and the results.
The way the researchers did this was to select appx 10,000 couples and screen them for genetic diseases while monitoring their reactions to the news and their stress levels, before asking them what they thought about the results they heard and whether they regretted partaking in the test. The results speak for themselves, with 76.6% of couples who were identified as having high risk (1.9% of survey size) deciding not to conceive based off of their results. Then comes the second portion of the experiment. As expected, those who were identified as having a higher than average chance of giving a genetic condition to their offspring had a higher stress, but across all groups the survey was deemed favorable with low regret. This is a great result, as I believe the researchers will use these results to apply for a grant to do more widespread research, or even to skip ahead and directly partner with the government to bring about widespread testing. This does bring some concerns to my mind though, as this type of research could be associated with a eugenics movement of "removing all genetic defects" even though the research is not at all geared in that direction. In order to avoid this, the results provided to the participants should not include any suggestions, but rather only the potential outcomes.
In the research listed on the NIH website, research was also done into stress related to how far the participants got in the process as well, painting a picture of a trend pointing towards lower anxiety the further along they got in the process. This set of research was more concerned with the reactions of the participants and how they felt, so more in-depth data on stress, conflicts, and worry are available. If you are interested in this segment of the research, please feel free to click the first link provided and delve the data.
Links
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8460434/
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2314768
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