I debated with Mr. Cornelius Chavis. He had a lot of good points.
We discussed the screening of infants with Huntington's disease. He was arguing against it and I was arguing for it. The debate opened with us presenting our sides; I started and went over my three minutes (and my 30 second grace period; whoops). Then Cornelius presented his points. Some of them are listed above, but he also brought several more points to my attention. The first one was that anyone who was tested and knew they were positive may become suicidal. I countered this by citing an article (Bioethics for the Future) that stated that people who tended not to be bale to handle the results would not go for the testing and that the suicide rate was lower than expected. He other thing he pointed out was that by diagnosing an infant, you can also diagnose an adult. If that adult did not want to know, then it would be a violation of those rights. I responded that, if the adult had been tested in the first place, it would not be an issue. Not to mention the fact that he would have been able to make an informed decision about whether or not he wanted to have children if they had a 50/50 chance of having Huntington's disease. Another case I chose to bring up to support this was one in which my mom had seen. She had traveled to Florida to stay with my aunt in a Cancer Treatment Center and there was a young woman there who had cancerous tumors. It turned out they were genetic. One of the toughest things she had to cope with was the fact that she may have passed it onto her son without knowing it.
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