Associate Professor Michelle Taylor-Sands, Ms Chanelle Warton
1Melbourne Law School
In Australia, some areas of reproductive medicine are regulated beyond the general regulation of health practitioners. However, there are inconsistencies within the current regulatory landscape of reproductive genetic testing. There is currently a national moratorium on the use of preimplantation genetic testing (PGT) for non-medical sex selection. By way of contrast, there is no regulation directly limiting access to non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT) in Australia. NIPT could therefore be used to detect the sex of a fetus, enabling parents to terminate a fetus of a particular sex.
The ethical concerns raised by non-medical sex selection using PGT are relevant to NIPT. These include negative impacts on society, gender essentialism, the welfare of the child, and the slippery slope of ‘designer babies’. There are also significant differences between preimplantation and prenatal testing. Most notably, a fetus is a part of a pregnant woman and they both share fetal information, whereas an ART embryo is formed outside the woman’s body. Also, selection using PGT involves potential destruction of an early-stage embryo compared with a fetus terminated during pregnancy following NIPT.
In this paper, we explore the ethical concerns raised by non-medical sex selection and highlight the ethically significant differences between PGT and NIPT. We examine the rationale for regulating reproductive medicine and argue that regulation should not unduly restrict access to NIPT. However, using PGT as a comparator, we argue that a facilitative approach to regulating NIPT can support prospective parents in making informed reproductive choices about sex selection that are ethically and emotionally complex.
Biography:
Michelle is Associate Professor and Director of the Health Law and Ethics Network and the Health and Medical Law Masters at Melbourne Law School. She is also a legal member of the Victorian Mental Health Tribunal. She specialises in health law and bioethics, with a focus on regulating reproductive health.
Chanelle 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.