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To the Editor: In their Commentary on preimplantation diagnosis,¹ Drs Towner and Loewy state that this new technology raises new ethical questions. In reality it raises an older and much more troubling question: "What kinds of people ought to reproduce?" Historical judgment of 20th-century experiences with eugenics and forced sterilizations make it almost impossible to ask, much less answer, this question.² The slippery slope that Towner and Loewy find themselves upon reminds us why this is the case.

The authors question "the choice of bringing into the world a child for whom the mother will, with near certainty, be unable to provide care." They suggest that inability to fulfill broadly construed responsibilities of parenthood, including survival for some number of years, might be reason to withhold assistive reproductive technologies. But what ought to be the responsibilities of parenthood? And where can we draw a threshold of certainty about future . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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Ethics of Preimplantation Diagnosis for a Woman Destined to Develop Early-Onset Alzheimer Disease
Dena Towner and Roberta Springer Loewy
JAMA. 2002;287(8):1038-1040.
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