This. I have no children yet, but would like to have them and am reaching the time of life where I need to start planning for that. If I had the gene, I would be strongly leaning towards either not having chilidren or having them in some way that avoided inheriting the gene (adoption, egg donor or pre-implantation genetics).
I’m fortunate that living in the UK I wouldn’t have to worry about health insurance, though it would probably impact on my ability to get life insurance and therefore a mortgage.
Okay, I’ll admit that I don’t actually know what Huntington’s disease is. It sounds horrid, like amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. But I’m completelty behind the idea of withholding progeny to stop such a disease from being passed down. Break the pattern! And if there’s a test for it, so much the better.
This happened to me years ago. We found out my grandmother had it. My dad got tested, and luckily for both of us, it was negative. His sister tested positive and choose not to tell her own grown children. These are people that were starting, or had already started, families of their own.
Waiting for my dad’s test results shook me up. If he had it, then I’d have a 50/50 shot. I was not ready to learn what I’d die from at 21.