ABSTRACT
Prenatal testing and selective abortion are topical issues in biomedical ethics and societal debate. Prenatal diagnosis for late (adult)-onset disorders is especially controversial. This chapter concentrates on the ethics of prenatal testing for Huntington disease (HD), which is often seen as the paradigm case of adultonset, dominant, neurogenetic disorders. The next section presents some general reflections on the task of the counsellor, more in particular on the principle of non-directiveness (section 2). The following sections focus on the main ethical aspects of the various methods of prenatal testing and preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) for HD (sections 3 and 4). The fifth section sketches some implications for and dilemmas regarding prenatal testing for other lateonset neurogenetic diseases, and the final section briefly comments on the ethical aspects of (still very speculative) fetal neural tissue transplantation in utero, aiming at the primary prevention of HD.
