Marc M. Beuttler, MA, Kara N. Goldman, MD, and Jamie A. Grifo, MD, PhD
Respect for informed, autonomous decision making demands that useful, if anxiety-provoking, information about age-related decline in fertility not be withheld from women.
The U. S. health care system encourages patients to take more responsibility for their own treatment decisions and expects their doctors to cooperate in that effort. But the guidelines for exercising that responsibility remain very murky indeed.
Developing technologies for personalized medicine may be misused to popularize the idea that one can infer a person’s genetic makeup from observer-defined or self-reported assignment to a race or ethnic group.