Is Non-Invasive Prenatal Testing The New ‘Right Tool For The Job’ In Human Genetics?

• In Event: Technomedicine and Reproduction

Abstract

Over the last decade, the field of prenatal genetics has experienced significant technological innovations. New technologies, popularly called ‘non-invasive prenatal testing’ (NIPT), can detect foetal genetic information in ways markedly distinct from previous technologies. Now, by analysing a blood sample drawn from a pregnant woman, the entire genome of a foetus can be sequenced. Despite the ‘cutting edge’ status this technology has gained, it has received relatively little public or academic attention.

This paper presents a snapshot of my PhD findings thus far. 14 health professionals working in prenatal care in Australia have been interviewed, centring on their attitudes and understandings of NIPT and foetal genome sequencing. Because formal and public discussions of NIPT have been dominated by the authoritative discourse of biomedicine, the aim was to provide interviewees with the opportunity to express personal and professional concerns about NIPT in a private and informal setting.

Whilst the development of NIPT has been coined as ‘a paradigm shift' and portrayed as a new, ‘revolutionary’ tool of empowerment for expecting women and parents, this paper finds that anonymous responses given by interviewees problematise the popular and far more stable understandings of NIPT that have taken dominated formal, public spaces. Drawing insight from Adele Clarke’s work on ‘the right tool for the job’ I aim to highlight the contingent and heterogeneous nature of this emergent technology (and it’s ‘rightness’), as well as the important roles spatial situatedness and temporality have in shaping discursive accounts of emerging biotechnologies like NIPT.

Author

• Zoe Olivia Jacoba Barker, University of Wollongong