Roles of family members
Family members involved in these decisions included
spouses, siblings, parents, and adult offspring. On the one
hand, such family members can push for testing.
My wife wanted . . . an answer: see what’s going on. So she pushed
me. After my mother’s death, I was depressed. She thought that
having the test would eliminate one possibility.[20]
This man at first opposed testing, but finally acquiesced.
Although his wife felt the test could help diagnostically, that
rationale did not sway him, at least initially.
Families may urge testing for several reasons, arguing, for
example, that for a member not to test was unfair to them. As
one man said to his untested brother: “that’s fine for you not to
get tested, but it’s not very fair for your wife and your
children.”[13] Hence, at times individuals had to weigh their
own preferences and desires concerning testing against others’
sense of that individual’s responsibilities to these others. Here,
this participant had to weigh his sense of autonomy versus
others’ sense of justice and of his ethical obligations to them