Civil rights groups in Minnesota and Texas are fighting their state governments in some of the first legal battles over newborn blood screening.Every newborn, at nearly any hospital worldwide, is put through a standard screening procedure within a few hours of birth. Doctors prick the infant’s heel, and a few drops of blood are screened for rare diseases, anonymized, stored and, sometimes, given to scientific researchers. These samples have proven invaluable to scientists who are studying the basis of complex psychiatric disorders, including autism.But here's where this gets ethically and legally sticky: newborn blood screening, at least in most U.S. states, happens automatically, often without the parents knowing about it, let alone consenting to it. According to an article in Science earlier this month, the lawsuits claim that taking and storing blood without the parents’ explicit consent violates privacy rights.Read more at...SFARI, April 2009.