Genetic Testing: Promise and Peril
Ottawa, Ontario, May 5, 2003

How do we avoid discrimination based on genetic testing?

When it comes to genetic testing, each of us is a potentially new kind of visible minority. Our DNA holds clues about our future health, and other traits, that could form the basis of discrimination. How might insurance companies and employers react to information from a genetic test?

The experts on the Genetic Testing: Promise and Peril panel encouraged people to think of genetic testing as another piece of personal health information in a larger social context in which discrimination has always been with us.

Abby Lippman notes that genetic testing forces us to reflect on whether the problems we're trying to solve are truly gene-based, or are in fact due to social norms and attitudes.

"The disability activist community argues that if you say that you can't discriminate based on sex, how can you discriminate based on ability?" says Lippman. "What is there that's so different about maleness and femaleness? Most of us who live in the post-feminist world realize that the problem with gender is not that I'm a woman and someone else is a man, but that the structures in society are set up to disadvantage women in certain ways that men are not disadvantaged."

Timothy Caulfield pushes this broader social line of thinking further in discussing ways that we can try and prevent genetic discrimination.

"Is genetic information really any different from any other health care information?" asks Caulfield. "Is genetic information different from a cholesterol test or from asking what your parents died of? I think that we need laws that cover not just genetic information, but all health information. Laws that allow people to have confidence in how their health information is being accessed."