Twila Brase of Citizens' Council for Health Freedom (CCHF) says certain legislators and organizations want to make sure that the DNA of newborns -- collected by each state at birth and stored by at least 10 of those states -- is available to researchers without parent consent. So CCHF has been "working hard" to ensure that parents have the right to control who can access the DNA of their newborns.
"In this lame-duck session, there is an attempt to move this no-consent language forward, and we are trying to stop that," Brase relays.
She says people can help by contacting Senator Rand Paul's (R-KY) office and voicing their support for his initiative to stop outsiders from taking, storing, and accessing the DNA of newborns without the parents' consent.
Brase asserts that the lack of coverage of this issue does not make it less serious or less real.
"It's a huge issue because … if the parents don't own the DNA of that child so that they don't control it, then all sorts of other people want to access it, want to control it, want to claim ownership over it in order to do whatever they want to do with it," she explains.
That could entail research, analysis, and/or profiling.
"[Parents] should be the ones protecting their newborns," argues Brase, but she says the government, March of Dimes, and other entities have formed a coalition to make sure that does not happen.
AFN has reached out to March of Dimes for comment.
