The Indian government and women's rights activists are targeting doctors using ultrasounds to reduce the number of female abortions. The government banned sex selection in 1994, although this does not seem to have straightened up an increasingly skewed sex ratio. It now requires any clinic with an ultrasound machine to register with the local government and to provide an affidavit that it will not conduct sex selection. So far, more than 30,000 ultrasound machines have been registered.

GE insists that it is complying with the law. It has educated its own sales force about the regulations, demanded affidavits of its own, and even audits its customers. In 2004, the first full year it implemented these measures, its sales in India contracted by 10%. A sharp decline in its budget $7,500 black and white ultrasound machine was partly responsible.

Nonetheless, the problem itself doesn't seem to be contracting. Last month prosecutors in Hyderabad opened a case against GE and Wipro and against Erbis Engineering, the Indian distributor for Toshiba. The government alleges that these companies knowingly supplied ultrasound machines to unregistered clinics which were performing sex selection tests. The chief executive of GE Healthcare South Asia, Mr V. Raja, says that GE would never supply a machine to a customer who might break the law. "There is no winking or blinking," he says.

Proving guilt or innocence will be tricky. The Hyderabad case involves a clinic which had not kept proper paperwork for two years. An ultrasound machine, said the clinic's owner, was the property of a freelance radiologist. It is possible for doctors to sell ultrasound machines to other doctors.

Conscience no longer has the prestige it had amongst baby-boomer children of the 60s. In 2005, for instance, Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich ordered pharmacists who invoked their conscience to ignore it and to fill prescriptions or face stiff penalties.

The Lafollettes' argument seems to assume that it is impossible to determine whether a conscience is right or wrong -- whether its principles are morally correct or incorrect. In that case, the only plausible standard for assessing moral judgements must be whether or not they harm someone else. Conscience is merely a private matter which cannot command the respect of society unless it mirrors society's standards.

Hence, the LaFollettes argue that "not all conscience should be treated equally... Once [a person's] actions significantly affect others, then we should determine whether her claims are sincere, plausible and consistent, and whether she shows reciprocal respect for others, especially if she is a member of a justified profession in a democratic and basically just society."

What appears to irritate the authors is that some pharmacists want to have their cake and eat it, too: to act according to their conscience and not to be fired for doing so. Conscience operates differently on the job and in the home, they argue: "Although my private conscience may tell me that I should not perform an act, I should not straightforwardly infer that it is also improper for me to do that act as a professional."

Since babies who carry the gene will not necessarily develop breast cancer and if they do, it will only happen after many years of a (hopefully) healthy life, the ethics of this procedure are far from settled. In its defence, Dr Serhal spoke of the harrowing medical histories of his patients. "We are talking about a killer gene that wipes out generation after generation of women," he says. "You can have a preventive mastectomy, but this is traumatic and mutilating surgery that does not eliminate the risk."

Nearly everyone seems opposed to genetic testing because it could be a tool of government or corporate oppression, as in the film Gattaca. However bioethicists Julian Savulescu, an Australian teaching at Oxford, and Bennett Foddy, of the University of Melbourne, have peered into their crystal ball and are rhapsodic about what they see. In an article in the Melbourne Age, they claim that it has immense potential benefits for increasing our range of personal choices. When technology is more developed, these might include: knowledge of genetic diseases, measuring talents and behavioural dispositions, promoting workplace safety and the public interest.