Question Video: Stating Examples of Advantages of Pre-marriage Medical Screening Biology

Video Transcript

Receiving medical counsel about the possibility of transmitting one’s preexisting diseases to one’s partner is an advantage of premarriage medical screening. What else is considered an advantage of premarriage medical screening? (A) Choosing characteristics like the eye color of the child before their birth. (B) Limiting the probability of giving birth to a healthy child. (C) Avoiding the financial, psychological, and social burdens that come with caring for a child suffering from genetic diseases. (D) None of the answers are correct.

Medical screening is done to detect infectious and genetic diseases which can be passed from parents to their offspring. Let’s go through the answer choices to see which one is correct.

In answer choice (A), we’re unable to choose certain characteristics like eye color before a child is born. We may have the technology to do this, but this is generally not done for ethical reasons. Therefore, answer choice (A) is not an advantage of premarriage medical screening.

Let’s look at answer choice (B) now and describe how premarriage medical screening can be used to predict the probability of giving birth to a healthy child. Let’s say we have a gene that we abbreviate with the letter T. We have two alleles. The functional allele is given by uppercase T, and the nonfunctional allele is given by lowercase t.

We can have three different possible genotypes as shown here. Having two copies of the lowercase t allele causes a disease, while having a single copy of uppercase T does not. If someone has a single copy of both, they don’t have the disease but are carriers of the disease-causing allele. When two heterozygotes have a child together, there’s a chance that the child will be affected by the disease. We can see that here. 25 percent of the time, both lowercase t alleles will be inherited, and the child will have this disease.

So, through premarriage medical screening, we can screen the potential parents to see if they’re carriers. If they are, then they can choose not to conceive a child. So premarriage medical screening can be used to limit the probability of giving birth to a baby with a genetic disease, which is the opposite of what answer choice (B) states. Therefore, this answer is incorrect.

By limiting the probability of having a child with a genetic disorder, potential parents can avoid the financial, psychological, and social burdens that come with this. So the correct option is answer choice (C), avoiding the financial, psychological, and social burdens that come with caring for a child suffering from genetic diseases.