Ms Chanelle Warton1
1Monash Bioethics Centre
As non-invasive prenatal testing encompasses an increasing range of conditions and gains popularity amongst pregnant people, there is a need to examine how prenatal genetic counselling can best support their reproductive autonomy. Non-directive counselling is the predominant approach within prenatal genetic counselling. Characterised by its apparent neutrality and comprehensive information provision, we argue that these features of non-directive counselling can actually impede autonomous reproductive choice following non-invasive prenatal testing. Shared decision-making has been proposed as an alternative to non-directive counselling. However, we argue that shared decision-making undermines the autonomous capacity of pregnant people by allowing decisional responsibility to be shared with healthcare providers. We thus propose a novel approach to prenatal genetic counselling that we have termed reproductive deliberation. Informed by concepts of relational autonomy, reproductive deliberation starts from the view that the pregnant person’s autonomy is constituted by components of their embedded social context. Our proposed approach to prenatal genetic counselling thus simultaneously recognises the relationality of the counselling encounter and also supports the autonomous decision-making and decisional responsibility of the pregnant person.
Biography:
Chanelle Warton is a doctoral candidate at the Monash Bioethics Centre, Monash University. She also holds a Master of Public Health from the University of Melbourne. Her current research examines the reproductive autonomy of parents in the context of prenatal genetic testing.