In every U.S. state, healthcare workers perform blood tests on newborn infants to check for a range of genetic disorders. However, in New Jersey, the state Department of Health stores infants’ blood for up to 23 years without informing parents or seeking their consent.
In addition to merely keeping the blood, New Jersey reserves the right to do whatever it wishes with the leftover blood, including selling it or handing it over to the police without a warrant. However, a new lawsuit from the Institute for Justice (IJ), a public interest law firm focused on government abuse, aims to challenge this status quo.
“It’s incredibly misleading for the state to tell parents they are simply drawing blood from their babies to test for diseases when it could be sold to third parties or used by other government agencies to build invasive databases or registries,” IJ Attorney Brian Morris said in a press release last week. “As Texas and other states have shown, these concerns aren’t hypothetical.”
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