Newborns' DNA targeted for state research, profiling
'What good is the privacy law if government warehouses data?'
The state of Minnesota has advanced a plan to own the DNA of newborns, preserving it in a warehouse for use in genetic research, experimentation, manipulation, and profiling, according to an advocacy organization seeking to protect the privacy of that individual information.
"Citizen DNA is citizen property. The government should be required to ask, not allowed to take," said Twila Brase, president of the Citizens' Council on Health Care, a Minnesota-based organization familiar with the progress in that state.
"If this bill becomes law, each year 73,000 newborn citizens will not be protected by the state genetic privacy law. The [state] will take their DNA and unless the parents figure it out, the government will keep it," she said.
"Children grow up. Eventually, every citizen will have their DNA owned by state government and available for government to engage in genetic research, experimentation, manipulation, and profiling," she warned. "What good is the state genetic privacy law if government warehousing and analysis of every child's DNA from birth is exempt from its informed consent protections?"
In Minnesota, the state's genetic privacy law was challenged by the Health Department, which lost a court battle over the issue. But now the legislation could give the state government by legislative activism what it could not obtain through the judiciary.
Brase said the state House voted this week to approve the plan forwarded by the state Senate. "If the Senate accepts the minor amendments adopted by the House without a conference committee, the bill could be sent directly to Gov. [Tim] Pawlenty for his signature."
The legislative specifically would exempt warehousing, use and analysis of newborn blood and DNA from the informed consent requirements of the 2006 Minnesota Genetic Privacy Law....
"We now are considered guinea pigs, as opposed to human beings with rights," she said, warning such DNA databases could spark the next wave of demands for eugenics, the concept of improving the human race through the control of various inherited traits. Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, advocated eugenics to cull people she considered unfit from the population.
In 1921, she said eugenics is "the most adequate and thorough avenue to the solution of racial, political and social problems," and she later lamented "the ever increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all."
Minnesota already has stockpiled the DNA of more than 780,000 Minnesota children, and already has subjected the DNA of 42,210 children to research without their consent or knowledge, Brase told WND.
Continued....
It seems the fight for newborn screening must also include the fight for proper boundaries to that screening. In 1917 various groups of oppressed Russians fought to overthrow the oppression by the Czar, but they failed to consider that thier revolution was being taken over by an even more oppressive groups, the Communists, and they suffered another 70+ year of even greater oppression. New-born screening is very important, but we need to make sure that it is limited to those conditions that warrent it, and remain voluntary (with adequate education)
