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Medical geneticists and genetic counselors have an often complicated and at times tense relationship with people with disabilities, their families, advocates, and scholars. Geneticists are strong advocates and supporters for all of their patients, regardless of their abilities and disabilities. Although people with disabilities should not be viewed as a homogenous group with no variation in attitudes and beliefs, a visit to a genetics clinic can make patients feel very “other” when they are analyzed, catalogued, measured, and examined to determine just how different they are, to find out what’s “wrong” with them. Many patients and advocates – though by no means all – view prenatal testing as an existential threat. To better understand this situation, a look at the historical origins of medical genetics can shed some light on this dynamic.
The medical genetics specialty began to cohere and develop in the decades between the 1940s and 1970s. Its roots go back before 1940, mostly in the form of eugenics. The term “medical genetics” was introduced in the early 1930s*, likely independently, by the eugenics-minded Madge Macklin, then at...