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Pregnancies are now often experienced as sources of anxieties involving many risks for the mother or the future child. Various biotechnologies have been developed to identify and intervene on these risks. Preimplantation genetic testing for polygenic disorders (PGT-P) is a new form of susceptibility testing during in vitro fertilisation. It provides embryos’ risks to develop complex conditions (eg, schizophrenia, cancers or cardiovascular diseases) to help parents choose the ‘best’ embryo to implant. The probabilistic nature of this technology and the fact that it opens the possibility to select embryos for non-medical traits have proven very controversial. So far PGT-P has only been used in limited cases in the USA and China, and is still illegal in most countries including the UK. There is therefore a pressing need for a better understanding of the social aspects of PGT-P. This research explored the discursive construction of PGT-P as a technology of risk management in a webinar produced by Genomic Prediction, a US-based company that offers PGT-P to fertility clinics. Drawing from the social studies and science, specifically STS and governmentality studies, and using a Foucauldian discourse analysis method, three main discourses were identified: on risk, ranking and choice. The main innovation of Genomic Prediction is the ranking of embryos based on the Embryo health score, a general index to estimate embryos’ global health. The analysis showed that the Embryo health score and the use of the bell curve as a visual representation of risk introduce a new way of measuring, ranking and communicating embryos’ risks. This ranking, echoing eugenics logics, constrains clients/parents’ choice by producing one outlier, the ‘healthiest’ embryo, i.e., parents’ decision is delegated to PGT-P. The discursive work deployed in the webinar frames reproduction as a space where all types and levels of risk are to be intervened on.
Agrandissement : Illustration 1
