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Beyond “Genetic Discrimination”: Toward the Broader Harm of Geneticism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2021

Susan M. Wolf
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Extract

The current explosion of genetic knowledge and the rapid proliferation of genetic tests has rightly provoked concern that we are approaching a future in which people will be labeled and disadvantaged based on genetic information. Indeed, some have already suffered harm, including denial of health insurance. This concern has prompted an outpouring of analysis. Yet almost all of it approaches the problem of genetic disadvantage under the rubric of “genetic discrimination.”

This rubric is woefully inadequate to the task at hand. It ignores years of commentary on race and gender demonstrating the limits of antidiscrimination analysis as an analytic framework and corrective tool. Too much discussion of genetic disadvantage proceeds as if scholars of race and gender had not spent decades critiquing and developing antidiscrimination theory.

Indeed, there are multiple links among race, gender, and genetics. Dorothy Roberts has discussed the historical links between racism and genetics, while she and others have begun to map connections between gender and genetics.

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Article
Information
Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics , Volume 23 , Issue 4 , Winter 1995 , pp. 345 - 353
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics 1995

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References

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I am grateful to Eric Juengst for raising the terminological concern that the analogue to “racists” and “sexists” cannot be “geneticists” (because we already use that to refer to certain professional specialists), and so requires a different term, perhaps “geneticizers.”Google Scholar

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