Prenatal diagnosis requests for Huntington's disease when the father is at risk and does not want to know his genetic status: clinical, legal, and ethical viewpoints

Abstract

Clinical genetics units of hospitals occasionally receive requests from women for prenatal diagnosis for Huntington's disease when their male partners are at risk and do not want to know their genetic status for the disease. These cases raise significant legal and ethical concerns for the clinical team because such prenatal tests can reveal that the woman's partner has the genetic mutation for Huntington's disease when he does not want this information and may be unprepared for it. In this paper we present clinical, legal, and ethical appraisals of this situation. We conclude that there is no easy answer to such requests and that clinical teams need to deal with them on the basis of the indi..