Fetus Genetic Testing Now Possible at 18 Pregnancy Weeks

American geneticists have developed a noninvasive technique that allows to eliminate genetic diseases at an early stage of fetus formation.

To decipher the fetus genome, they used the mother’s blood and the father’s saliva. At that time, the mother was at 18 pregnancy weeks. Having deciphered the genome, the researchers compared the results with the “real” fetal DNA, whose analysis was taken from the umbilical cord after the birth of the child. The coincidence was 98%.

The researchers led by Dr. Jay Shendure from the University of Washington hope that their findings will be used to run tests for genetic diseases without the risk of complications in the fetus. Invasive methods that exist today (e.g. the procedure of checking for Down syndrome, when amniotic fluid is taken with a thin needle) can cause complications in a child, and in 1% of cases they even lead to miscarriage.

The simplicity of this method has initiated some ethical issues. For example, professor of molecular medicine at the University of Leeds, David Bontron, tells BBC that genetics is developing at an incredible pace, so there inevitably appear questions like what one can do with this information. According to him, this is a social question, the question about what society considers acceptable. Of course, the information can be neutral, but the negative results of prenatal genetic testing almost always lead to abortion nowadays. The paradox is that we want to simplify these methods, but the simpler and the more reliable the test is, the greater becomes the likelihood that the number of abortions will increase.