81GyGuy said...
Maybe this helps clarify it (or maybe muddles it further):
"The duty to inform [at risk relatives of the patient] varies by state, and courts have ruled differently in response to distinct cases.
The American Society of Human Genetics suggests that disclosure to at-risk individuals is permissible when the following criteria are met:
Attempts to encourage disclosure on the part of the patient have failed
Harm is highly likely, serious, imminent, and foreseeable
At-risk relatives are identifiable
Disease is preventable or medically accepted standards for treatment or screening are available
Harm from failing to disclose outweighs the harm from disclosure."
From:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/nbk115574/
(And maybe I'll just quit right now as far as pursuing any settled legal conclusion about this thing. I'm starting to get the feeling there isn't any).
Almost 20 years ago now, I took a course in Family Law as part of a Master's Program. So many things that we discussed were in their infancy back then like reproductive rights of the divorced who still maintain embryos in cryonic storage, adoption of a child with an unknown or unlisted father, and a laundry list of other issues we now see in the news regularly. The water will get muddier and muddier and almost certainly any rules in place right now will ultimately be undermined in an effort to clarify "understanding." Sort of like using Comet to clean windows, right? The desire to clean it up, but making it worse in the process.
But from my perspective, I have to wonder about
who interprets the threshold for, "Harm from failing to disclose outweighs the harm from disclosure." There's no real way to determine the after effects of these kinds of disclosure and it makes ripe the worry I have that, "We're doing this so everyone can live happily ever after."
Turning 50 in a few days. Pretty sure this issue will still be murky when I turn 80, 90, or 100. ;)