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Tuesday, May 9, 2006 12:00 AM

Preventing breast cancer before birth

A new proposal in Britain could allow women with a family history of the disease to screen embryos for susceptibility.

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  • Tuesday, May 9, 2006 09:35 AM

    Sliding scale...

    If you had a history of severe bipolar disorder or schizophrenia or Huntingdon's chorea in your family, and you had the opportunity to screen embryos for genes indicating that likelihood, I think doing so would be very reasonable. These are illnesses that either can show up early and wreak enormous havoc on a person's life, or have a high probability of causing a devastating decline in the prime of life. There are probably others like them.

    To me, that's not eugenics. That's preventing your future children from a lifetime of suffering, either from a debilitating condition or, as in the case of Huntingdon's, from the all-pervasive sense of a sword hanging over their heads. And that has nothing to do with keeping one's hereditary line "uncontaminated."

    However, breast cancer--any kind of cancer with a hereditary risk, in fact--is another story altogether. Even those with hereditary risk can evade it. And those without it in their family can become sick.

    You could even give your offspring a false sense of security. At some point they might find out that they were screened before birth for cancer genes, and as a result come to believe that they were somehow "resistant" to cancer, as a result not doing the things that would prevent it or enable them to get it treated early. (I can just see it now: "I don't need a mammogram! My mother made sure I didn't have genes for breast cancer.")

    I don't think screening for hereditary disorders and risks is entirely wrong, but a woman would need to ask herself: how likely, really, is a child with these genes to die or suffer severely from these illnesses? How much less likely, honestly, is it that they might get them anyways?

    And it's important to remember that we're not talking about lives at this point, but about potential.

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