Gender and Health in the Discourses Around Polygenic Embryo Screening

The aim of this paper is to explore how notions of gender and health are deployed and impacted by discourses on technologies of embryo selection.

As pregnancies increasingly evoke anxieties regarding health risks for mothers and future children, various biotechnologies, including Preimplantation Genetic Testing for Polygenic Disorders (PGT-P), have emerged to assess and mitigate these risks. PGT-P is a new form of susceptibility genetic testing on embryos used during In vitro fertilisation. It provides embryos’ risks to develop complex conditions (eg, schizophrenia, cancers or cardiovascular diseases) to help parents select the ‘best’ embryo for implantation. This paper investigates gender- and health-talk within discourses surrounding PGT-P.

Three key discourses are identified from discussions in a publicly available webinar hosted by Genomic Prediction, a US-based company providing PGT-P to fertility clinics: Gendered Defense of Technology, Technology Users (including gendered users), and Health as a Continuum.

This research sheds light on how selective reproduction technologies shape and are shaped by gender-related discourses. Finally, framing health as a continuum from less healthy to healthier (rather than as categorical healthy/ill), makes the idea of health more amenable to optimisation (rather than a focus on cure and treatment).