REBECCA BENNETT ANTENATAL GENETIC TESTING AND THE RIGHT TO REMAIN IN IGNORANCE ABSTRACT. As knowledge increases about the human genome, prenatal genetic testing will become cheaper, safer and more comprehensive. It is likely that there will be a great deal of support for making prenatal testing for a wide range of genetic disorders a routine part of antenatal care. Such routine testing is necessarily coercive in nature and does not involve the same standard of consent as is required in other health care settings. This paper asks whether this level of coercion is ethically justifiable in this case, or whether pregnant women have a right to remain in ignorance of the genetic make-up of the fetus they are carrying. While information gained by genetic testing may be useful for pregnant women when making decisions about their pregnancy, it does not prevent harm to future children. It is argued that as this kind of testing provides information in the interests of the pregnant women and not in the interests of any future child, the same standards of consent that are normally required for genetic testing should be required in this instance. KEY WORDS: autonomy, consent, coercion, harm, prenatal genetic testing It is generally accepted that competent individuals should be allowed to choose whether or not to have diagnostic tests especially those that may indicate potentially serious conditions. While there may be temptations on the part of the health professionals to test for conditions without the explicit informed consent of patients, such temptations are usually deemed unacceptably paternalistic [1]. It is normally assumed that the decision to undergo diagnostic tests particularly those for genetic disorders or diseases with serious consequences should be a fully informed, freely chosen, care- fully considered one. The Nuffield Council on Bioethics, for instance, not only recommends that “adequately informed consent should be a require- ment for all genetic screening programmes” [2] (a process that should include extensive counselling), but also that the “[t]he voluntary nature of the screening process must be emphasised” [2, para. 4.29]. The General Medicine Council also stress the importance of informed consent for any diagnostic test emphasising that “[s]ome conditions, such as HIV, have serious social and financial, as well as medical, implications. In such cases you must make sure that the patient is given appropriate information about the implications of the test, and appropriate time to consider and discuss them.” 1 Theoretical Medicine 22: 461–471, 2001. © 2001 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.