Genetic risk and reproductive decisions: Meta and counter narratives

People with a family history of hereditary disease can dispute the common assumption that genetic risk must be contained at all costs. Whilst not averse to undergoing predictive genetic testing, their decisions regarding reproduction can be controversial and may appear to be unethical. In this article three narratives on reproductive decisions by people at risk of Huntington's disease reveal that neither the lay person's ethical considerations on reproductive choice nor the resistance he or she may display toward dominant narratives on risk containment are straightforward. The informants' accounts are examined as counter narratives of resistance against the backdrop of a dominant meta-narrative on genetic risk, yet they raise the question of whether people can truly speak outside the systematised productions of knowledge that are formative of their social realities.