[sokoloff]

It depends on how you see autism. If we develop a universal therapeutic cure for cancer, that would eliminate “people with cancer” but not by eliminating those people.

Developing a pregnancy screening for “fetuses pre-disposed to cancer” may have an entirely different mechanism of reducing cancer and one that many people (myself included) would find far more troubling that the therapeutic cure above.

[MontyCarloHall]

Why would you be troubled by this? Consider Li-Fraumeni syndrome (LFS), which is caused by germline loss of a specific tumor suppressor gene. People with LFS are basically guaranteed to develop cancer by age 60 (>90% chance), with a 50% risk of getting cancer by 40. There are many other similar hereditary genetic disorders, some of which are exceptionally awful and basically guarantee that one will develop childhood cancer (e.g. Turcot syndrome).

I see absolutely no downside to prenatal testing for such horrible diseases, all of which have a clear-cut genetic basis. Nobody has issues with prenatal screening for Tay-Sachs disease; why should genetically unambiguous severe predisposition to cancer be any different?

[sokoloff]

Concrete example: Many people (about 1 in 400*) have BRAC1 or BRAC2 genetic markers that leave them with higher likelihood to develop certain cancers. I don't see that as justification for eliminating those gene lines from the human genetic diversity.

We did prenatal testing. We didn't do it for no reason and there were test outcomes that would have led us to terminate the pregnancy. Elevated risk of breast cancer would not be among them.

* - Among Ashkenazi, the rate is about 10 times higher.