Posts Tagged ‘screening’

At the West Yorkshire Humanists March lecture Professor Karl Atkin, head of the University of York’s Health Sciences department, presented a talk on genetic screening during pregnancy.

Much of the screening has only been introduced in the past 10-20 years, and with generic screening becoming more common, Professor Atkin asked whether we were having the right discussions about ethics as we proceed.

Recently, there has been quite a lot of discussion around the subject of adoption. People stand in horror that the adoption process is being sped up so that we can match children to adoptive parents in a quicker amount of time.

The phrase you hear most often is that “we need to make sure that perspective parents are suitable.”

But is that really true? I’m going to suggest not.

The reason is, we don’t actually need adoptive parents to be that suitable. Of course if they are brilliant perspective parents then that is fantastic news, but I think we need to take a more pragmatic approach to the whole situation.

After all, these are kids who are usually in care homes. So the question isn’t are we placing them with suitable people, it’s whether we are placing them we a couple who would be at minimum more suitable than living in a care home.

We know that a care home isn’t a good environment to bring a child up in, we’ve done the research and statically it doesn’t end as well. So the question then becomes, what exactly would be the harm in having a more relaxed attitude to adoption?