Faculty of Law Health Law, Ethics & Policy Seminar Series
presents
Vardit Ravitsky
Associate Professor, Bioethics Program
School of Public Health, University of Montreal
The Shifting Landscape of Prenatal Testing:
Ethical and Social Implications of Non-Invasive Prenatal Testing
Thursday, November 23, 2017
12:30 – 2:00
Solarium (Room FA2), Falconer Hall
84 Queen’s Park
The introduction of cell-free fetal DNA testing, or Non-Invasive Prenatal Testing (NIPT), is gradually changing the landscape of prenatal testing. By providing results that are more reliable than serum screening, earlier in the pregnancy and without increased risk of miscrriage, NIPT represents great benefits, but its probable routinization also raises numerous challenges. This presentation will explore the ethical and social implications of NIPT on the backdrop of two competing and largely irreconcilable rationales for prenatal testing: the reproductive autonomy rationale, which argues that access to prenatal testing supports and promotes women’s informed choices, and the public health rationale, thatapproaches prenatal testing as designed to reduce the incidence of certain conditions in the population.
Vardit Ravitsky is Associate Professor at the Bioethics Program at the School of Public Health, University of Montreal and Director of the Ethics and Health Branch of the Center for Research in Ethics. Ravitsky is an elected Board member and Treasurer of the International Association of Bioethics (IAB) and member of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Standing Committee on Ethics. Previously, she was faculty at the School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on reproductive ethics and genetics. She published over 100 articles, book chapters and commentaries on bioethical issues, and is lead-editor of "The Penn Center Guide to Bioethics".
A light lunch will be served.
We will start promptly at 12.30 so in order to take your lunch, please come on time.
For more information about this workshop, please contact Nadia Gulezko at n.gulezko@utoronto.ca.
