The Human Genetics Commission recently reported that preconception screening should be made more widely available to couples, allowing them to determine risks for carrying specific diseases. Some argue this may be a form of eugenics and should be discouraged; and others worry about the potential for the stigmatizations of those who are genetically unfit to have children. Yet, there is still strong support for the advantages to risk assessment, especially when facing the daunting task of raising a child with disabilities. While the commission stated there are “no specific social, ethical or legal principles" involved with preconception screening, there are certainly socio-technical considerations that can be exposed in regards to the political nature and privacy of such testing.
Genetic testing has been called the new age of medicine but this title brings with it a plethora of social concerns and political agenda’s designed to safeguard society against the genes potential exposing ones privacy. Author Charis Thompson delves into a similar world of Assisted Reproductive Technologies and examines a new mode for assessing how society and technology interact with each other, namely through “rhetorical forms of privacy.” Distinct forms of privacy, such as individual, autonomous scientific research and the private sector, are capable of acting as a broker for relationships between individuals in society and their government or politics of government. It is within this privacy space that social and technical innovations are able to emerge with goal of maintaining that privacy. The fact that preconception screening can be supported by government agency should come as no surprise to supporters of Thompsons claims, as it has emerged within a field of high privacy for the individual with a strong focus upon best practice methods. In the privacy interests of the individual, the values surrounding maintaining that level of privacy will mediate with the governments to resolve conflicts of interest. In this situation it may mean allowing preconception screening to advance without government support but also without government regulation, at least minimal, or control, leaving individuals and the government in separate spheres. But even when the social and political actors surrounding use of technologies are separated by privacy, there is still a recognizable interaction between them facilitated through law that deserves attention.
If the key to brokering the relationship between an individual and the government resides in privacy, as Charis Thompson claims, then how does one define the indirect relationship between the technological artifact created within the privacy realm, society and politics? Langdon Winner articulates the political processes found within technologies and the potential consequences that stem from them. Taking a Winner approach to preconception screening, one might argue that the technology of genetic testing arose to fulfill a niche within society that wanted better more accurate medicine for all the different individuals out there. Society perhaps wanted to know more about what to expect and anticipate, leaving a space for genetics to develop in that direction in order to settle some sort of issue within American society, and perhaps the world, about health and medicine. It is this process of development that Winner focuses upon for the assessment of political nature of technologies as it creates a situation where the social interests of a technology can be in favor of either honoring the science as revolutionary or as destructive. His point here is that the process is the key, the development of technology has been in play far longer than the consequences are felt. Preconception screening is perhaps a consequence of genetic testing development and it is because of this development within a society that fostered it to occur in a particular direction. It is in this sense of consequences and processes that genetics becomes political.
Both Thompson and Winner can be distinguished as creating new boundaries for the interface between technology and society and how they relate to politics. As preconception screening emerges into society to either be accepted or rejected, it is perhaps not the end result that matters but the process of getting to a result that will reshape those boundaries. With so many different predictions for the impact genetics will have upon reproductive technology and society, the lucidity of tension between the pro’s and cons of its development and issues surrounding individual privacy will impact the ultimate direction that genetic testing will take in the future. But for now the technology has arrived.
No comments:
Post a Comment