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Currents in Contemporary Bioethics

Waiving Informed Consent to Prenatal Screening and Diagnosis? Problems with Paradoxical Negotiation in Surrogacy Contracts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2021

Katherine Drabiak-Syed
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Extract

Recently, an agonizing twist intersecting predictive genetic tests and surrogacy contracts made news headlines in Canada. The intended parents, a couple from British Columbia, instructed the surrogate mother with whom they were working to undergo First Trimester Screening and Chorionic Villi Sampling (CVS), which revealed the fetus likely had Down syndrome. The parents directed the surrogate to terminate the fetus or they would abdicate their parental claim upon birth. This story raised numerous legal and ethical questions relating to the transferability of decision making for prenatal screening, diagnostic tests, and the connected decision of termination when additional interested parties – the intended parents – are involved in the medical decision-making relationship. First, although the surrogate is the patient, what are the implications when the intended parents' wishes influence or even dictate the relationship between her and her obstetrician and genetic counselor? Second, if the intended parents' level of authority reaches explicit demands, may the intended parents ethically and legally require the surrogate to waive her right to informed consent for prenatal screening and diagnosis?

Type
JLME Column
Information
Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics , Volume 39 , Issue 3 , Fall 2011 , pp. 559 - 564
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics 2011

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Footnotes

Mark A. Rothstein serves as the section editor for Currents in Contemporary Bioethics. Professor Rothstein is the Herbert F. Boehl Chair of Law and Medicine and the Director of the Institute for Bioethics, Health Policy and Law at the University of Louisville School of Medicine in Kentucky.

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