Law in tension with evolving ethical perception: prenatal genetic testing for sex and disability
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Legal prohibitions are often simple responses to highly complex ethical and social problems. Recommendations for legal prohibition of prenatal sex-selection distinguish between testing for sex and for disabling conditions. This distinction appears to be based on an objective difference between gender and disease or conditions that are themselves causes of suffering. But ethical analysis reveals symmetry between these two cases, challenging whether the law is responding to differences in the nature of the test, or to social pressures against discrimination that are better developed with respect to sexism than is the case for disability discrimination. This paper argues that the strongest position against sex-selection is based on a rejection of the parental assessment that a person’s sex seriously compromises quality of life together with the dedication of social resources to minimize discrimination based on sex. Some genetic conditions produce disabilities that cannot be alleviated through improved social circumstances; the reasons for not restricting prenatal testing and termination as an option for parents for these conditions are distinguishable from those supporting prohibition of sex-selection. However, the severity and lack of predictability of disability associated with other genetic conditions are strongly contingent on social circumstances. Thus it may be reasonable to acknowledge that serious social reforms are required while at the same time supporting parental assessment of quality of life through testing and termination. But problems to do with the aggregate effects of individual parental choices, together with the need to work toward more supportive social circumstances, emphasize the importance of involving persons with disabilities and their spokespersons in evaluating social circumstances, disability discrimination, appropriate prenatal testing and related information to support parental decisions.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.052 | 0.077 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.083 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.016 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.024 | 0.035 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".