http://www.abc.net.au/rn/healthreport/stories/2011/3314137.htm


The screening for CAH in pregnant women has lead to two completely unacceptable situations. In the USA screening has lead to the termination of pregnancies where a foetus is thought to have CAH and to the treatment of pregnant women with dexamethazone.

The unspoken word in this report is Intersex. CAH is one of the most common underlying causes of Intersex in XX humans. The push for pre natal screening is not so much for the problems surrounding mineral corticol deficiencies, which have been manageable since the introduction of mineral corticol replacement therapy more than forty years ago, so much as the wish to prevent the birth of infants od uncertain sex and sexuality.

This prenatal screening is being propelled by a homophobic American middle class and justified under the contentious Disorders of Sexual development (DSD) terminology and the protocols that surround it.

To fully understand this one has to appreciate the reasons Medicine decided to abandon the word Intersex in 2006 and adopt the more pathologising term DSD. Parents reaction to the birth of an Intersex child in middle class white America was significantly homophobic . Fears that the ambiguous sex of their child made them somehow queer and potentially gay have lead to many kinds of sex normalising surgeries, medications and behaviour changing regimes.

For CAH kids only some have the salt wasting problems associated with this genetic difference and that problem is amenable to simple medical treatment in much the same way diabetes is. But for CAH people the differences in sex anatomy producing a significantly different reaction to other treatable medical differences such as diabetes. That reaction is largely the result of societal rejection of sex differences.

Rather than address that reaction doctors have chosen to eliminate the problem using surgery , medications behaviour reinforcement and in the end abortion .

People such as myself are being deselected from the gene pool. Well not quite. Were we are being deselected is from white middle class society. CAH will in the end become a difference of the poor and disadvantaged, a difference confined to those who are either unprejudiced or cannot afford to have their prejudices expressed over the body of their child .

For treatment of pregnant women see http://fetaldex.org/home.html for treatment of post surgical CAH kids see http://www.thehastingscenter.org/Bioethicsforum/Post.aspx?id=4730&blogid=140

For the protocols that have been used in both cases to erase intersex see http://www.accordalliance.org/dsd-guidelines.html why it is bad see http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_go2103/is_5_38/ai_n31347585/pg_2/

I am Gina Wilson OII Australia President