Rayna Rapp wrote a book about amniocentesis and couples who choose whether or not to abort if their baby turns out to be handicapped. She quotes Avram Terguvnick, a medical geneticist:
“We are in a fast-moving train, and we manage to learn how to eat in the train, even sleep in the train. But I don’t think we think very much about where the train is going. Or, at the least, we are very simplistic… Of course, geneticists are the ones creating the technology. But it is being created without too much thought. Of course, if you really want to get to the social issue, you’d better get to whoever is driving the train… When I began, this work belonged in academic medicine; now it is rapidly commercializing. Pretty soon, it will just be profit-making labs offering kits. They’ll have a roving genetic counselor to pay lip service to malpractice insurance. This is not what geneticists wanted when we insisted on genetic counseling.”
Rayna Rapp Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: the Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America (New York: Routledge, 1999) 23
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