Her first thought after she heard the news, after she screamed and made her
mother and boyfriend leave the room, was that she would never have children.
Amanda Baxley’s doctor had just told her, over a speakerphone in her
psychiatrist’s office, that she had the gene for Gerstmann-Straussler-Scheinker
disease, or GSS, which would inevitably lead to her slow and terrible death.
This rare neurological disease had stalked her family for generations. Her
father, 56, was even then in its final throes.
On the spot, Ms. Baxley, 26, declared she would not let the disease take
another life in her family line, even if that meant forgoing childbirth.
“I want it stopped,” she said. The next day, her boyfriend, Bradley Kalinsky, asked her to marry him.
“I want it stopped,” she said. The next day, her boyfriend, Bradley Kalinsky, asked her to marry him.
But the Kalinskys’ wedded life has taken a completely unexpected turn, one
briefly described on Monday in
The Journal of the American Medical Association
Neurology. Like a growing number of couples who know a disease runs in the
family, they chose in vitro fertilization, and had cells from the embryos,
created in a petri dish with her eggs and his sperm, tested first for the
disease-causing gene. Only embryos without the gene were implanted. The
Kalinskys are now parents of three children who will be free of the fear of
GSS.
Amanda and Bradley Kalinsky plan to tell their children about the deadly,
slow-moving disease their mother might develop.
Genetic testing of embryos has been around for more than a decade, but its
use has soared in recent years as methods have improved and more
disease-causing genes have been discovered. The in vitro fertilization and
testing are expensive — typically about $20,000 — but they make it possible for
couples to ensure that their children will not inherit a faulty gene and to
avoid the difficult choice of whether to abort a pregnancy if testing of a
fetus detects a genetic problem.
But the procedure also raises unsettling ethical questions that trouble
advocates for the disabled and have left some doctors struggling with what they
should tell their patients. When are prospective parents justified in
discarding embryos? Is it acceptable, for example, for diseases like GSS, that
develop in adulthood? What if a gene only increases the risk of a disease? And
should people be able to use it to pick whether they have a boy or girl? A
recent international survey found that 2 percent of more than 27,000 uses of
preimplantation diagnosis were made to choose a child’s sex.
In the United States, there are no regulations that limit the method’s use.
The Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology, whose members provide
preimplantation diagnosis, says it is “ethically justified” to prevent serious
adult diseases for which “no safe, effective interventions are available.” The
method is “ethically allowed” for conditions “of lesser severity” or for which
the gene increases risk but does not guarantee a disease.
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