Harold Pollack says genetic screening is more accessible than ever, and health-care providers are scrambling to catch up.
In retrospect, these innovations were incredibly tame. Technological limits, cost, intrusiveness, and risk constrained the scope of screening efforts. Roughly one in every 200 amniocenteses resulted in miscarriage, which made the procedure too risky to justify screening the full population of pregnant women. The human genome had yet to be sequenced. Newborn screening was routinely used to identify a handful of important metabolic disorders, but it was a very expensive process. There was a certain clarity, too. The most common use of amniocentesis was (and remains) to detect conditions associated with very serious physical or intellectual disabilities. When such conditions were detected, most parents chose to terminate the pregnancy.
