 The proliferation of genetic technologies in the mid-twentieth century brought with it a demand for healthcare workers who could process that information and help patients understand it. The result was genetic counseling programs. The professional emergence of genetic counseling occurred at the very same time that abortion was decriminalized in a number of countries, the disability rights movement and second-wave feminism gained momentum, and bioethical attention to patient autonomy became a serious consideration in clinical care. This created a profound tension for the young community of genetic counselors. On the one hand, genetic counseling had a disciplinary ancestry that ran directly through heredity clinics and straightforward eugenics before that; many of the genetic counselor’s tools (e.g., constructing a family pedigree) and many of the traits that received genetic counseling attention (e.g., Down syndrome) were the very same tools and traits at the center of the earlier practices. On the other hand, the genetic counselors—mostly women—were much more attuned than the heredity clinic and medical genetics pioneers—mostly men—to the moral and social problems with paternalistic medicine and eugenics highlighted by the critics from feminism, disability rights, and bioethics. The genetic counselors navigated this tension by embracing a principle of nondirectiveness; rather than telling patients how to act on the genetic information they received, genetic counselors aspired to simply convey that genetic information in a non-biased way and help the patients decide for themselves how to act on that information (Stern 2012). 