Prenatal testing

Subject: The birth of a child is one of the most significant events in human life. Mothers and fathers wish the best for their offspring. Health, success and a happy life. The way these hopes and desires are experienced, however, is by no means an exclusively private affair. On the contrary, the experience of pregnancy today is shaped to a great extent by the techno-scientific developments in reproductive medicine. The question: will my child be healthy? gains a totally different and new meaning if the possibility exists to answer this question by means of prenatal examinations. The question abruptly arises of whether or not to continue the pregnancy if an examination yields pathologic results. It is momentous decisions of this kind that are connected with prenatal testing and they have a quality which they did not have prior to the existence of these examinations. Framing prenatal testing as individual dicision and distributed action, this collection adresses the paradoxical tension between decisions that are understood to be taken autonomously and a complex medical network without which a pregnant woman would not be in a position to decide between an abortion or the continuation of her pregnancy because of a predicted disease or disabililty of the expected child. Contents: Introduction Wilhelm Berger: Towards an Ethics of Distributed Responsibility Bernhard Wieser & Sandra Karner: Individualising Decisions: On the Paradoxes of Prenatal Testing. Susan M. Cox: Paradoxes of Prenatal Testing and Their Consequences Louise Locock & Jo Alexander: ‘Just a Bystander’? Men’s Place in the Process of Fetal Screening and Diagnosis. Celia Roberts: Enacting Gender in Reproductive Medicine Bernhard Wieser: Translating Medical Practices: An Actor-Network Theory Perspective Ingo Schulz-Schaeffer: Who Is the Actor and Whose Goals Will Be Pursued? Rethinking Some Concepts of Actor Network Theory Andreas Heller & Stefan Dinges: Organisational Ethics - and Their Role in Counselling and Decision-Making Processes for Prenatal Testing Barbara Maier: Autonomy: On Decision-Making in Prenatal Diagnosis Marcus Düwell: Genetic Diagnosis in Reproductive Medicine: Aspects of an Ethical Evaluation About the Authors