“Doing Good Care” and “Doing Ethics”: Genetic Counselors’ Professional and Ethical Boundary Work

• In Event: 30668 - New Boundaries and Jurisdictions

Abstract

Scholarship on medical professionals has highlighted how the work of professions is about control over jurisdiction and protection of status, or what has been referred to as professional boundary making. In the meantime, scholars of science-technology-medicine have focused on how biomedical workers navigate many ethical issues and controversies while doing and justifying the work that they do, what has been referred to as ethical boundary making. This paper takes the case study of a newly emerged health profession – genetic counselors – to examine their simultaneous activities of professional and ethical boundary making with a focus on two key bioethical issues that this biomedical occupation is enmeshed in: informed consent and conflict of interests. Drawing on 65 in-depth interviews, and documents from the profession, this paper asks: 1) How is the genetic counseling profession defining their expertise and what roles genetic counselors should emphasize and take ownership of? (i.e., how do they do professional boundary work?); and 2) How does genetic counseling professional boundary making reveal ethics work and ethical conflicts? (i.e., how do they do ethical boundary work?). From their accounts, this paper shows how these health professionals attempts of “doing good care” and “doing ethics” engages with both intra- and inter- professional conflicts, and thus how the interplay of professional and ethical boundary making can both mark off and expand professional boundaries, having implications for the dissemination of genetic science from the lab to the clinic.

Author

• Susan Markens, CUNY-Lehman College