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Prenatal screening isn’t new. But I wanted to look back on how the past 40 years of it has changed the way we think about our relationship to our unborn children.
Caroline: You wrote that this isn’t just a story about Denmark or even Down syndrome—it’s about something much bigger. Could you explain what you mean by that?
Sarah: We look to DNA—or science in general—to answer questions. What really happens when you take a DNA test is you get some sort of answer, but it’s almost never a yes or a no. What you’re really dealing with is more uncertainty.
What’s happening here, with prenatal screening for Down syndrome, is that you’re given this result, and suddenly your whole future is blown up with uncertainty. And I was interested in how parents were grappling with that.
I was especially interested because there are new ways to test for things like risk of mental illness or heart disease or cancer. If we are finding it so difficult to grapple with the uncertainty of Down syndrome—which is diagnosed with a test that can tell you exactly whether there is an extra 21st chromosome or not—how are you going to deal with tests that give you, say, a probability of something?
What’s also been interesting to me is how we use genetics to think about what is “normal”—or to enforce what is normal.
Caroline: What do you hope people will take away from this story?
Sarah: I hope that people take away that this isn’t something that’s in the future. These aren’t hypothetical designer babies. These are decisions that we are making right now and have been making. Slow-moving change is hard to observe in the moment.
One question, answered: Can I build an immunity to COVID-19 without ever being sick?
Immunity isn’t simple, and not all antibodies will stop the spread of the disease, James Hamblin explains in his latest “Paging Dr. Hamblin” column:
A brief exposure to a tiny amount of virus in a grocery store may be enough to turn your antibody test positive, but it seems less likely to confer meaningful, lasting protection than if you’d had a serious case of COVID-19. The degree to which the severity of COVID-19 is related to the types of antibodies that develop remains unclear, and we can expect outliers of all sorts to be reported. …
For now, no one should behave any differently right now just because they’ve had a positive antibody test. We still need to get better at deciphering which antibodies people have—and how many are needed to confer immunity—before we can assure them that they are protected.
Continue reading. Every Wednesday, James takes questions from readers about health-related curiosities, concerns, and obsessions. He has also answered:
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