This case study makes it very clear that we have to face the ethic dimension of the question:

"Not one day goes by", a woman in her mid-forties acknowledges, "during which I do surrender to the wishful thinking that Frank would get up from this wheel-chair and walk around the apartment, and nobody would have to fear that he would endanger other people around him." Frank, her fifteen year old son, will be attached to his wheel-chair in the day-time and to his bed during the night, in order to stop him from tear himself to pieces in an attack of bite-rage. Most of his teeth have already been taken out, because he began to bite and chew his tongue and his mouth. Frank is debile, fidgety and erratic in his bizarre expressions of life. He suffers from the Lesch-Nyhan-Syndrome, a hereditary illness, Hyperurichämie (Over saturation of the blood with urine acid).

This pitiful boy would probably not have been born, if his mother had made an amnion fluid test early in her pregnancy. The laboratory assistants would probably been able to detect this hereditary defect which brings about these horrible symptoms with their difficult and expensive test. Probably the physician treating her would have advised the young woman to abort her child. Now that Frank is alive, even though probably not much longer than for twenty years, no-one can help him anymore.