The Janus Face of Prenatal Diagnosis: A European Study Bridging Ethics, Psychoanalysis and Medicine

Coping with modern technology (genetics, biotechnology etc.) has become a major issue of people living in the 21st century. This technology creates new chances and possibilities but also new dangers and ethical concerns.

This book investigates ethical dilemmas connected to these new technologies in a field of prenatal and genetic research that seems particularly challenging: prenatal diagnostics. In the last decades enormous progress has been made in diagnosing genetically based diseases and other serious prenatal abnormalities. Despite intensive world-wide research, several problems have emerged and still wait to be answered. The most prominent aim of the book is to address major ethical dilemmas in the context of genetic and prenatal diagnosis, and by that means help to create greater awareness of and sensitivity to these dilemmas among various segments of the societies.