This just in, a story in the Guardian referring to an article in the most recent issue of Nature:
A clinical trial into the effects of allowing couples to choose the sex of their babies has been given the go-ahead at a US fertility clinic. The controversial study was given the green light by an ethics committee after nine years of consultation. The purpose of the study is to find out how cultural notions, family values and gender issues feed into a couple's desire to choose the gender of their child.
Yes, you are reading that right, folks. A team of fertility specialists at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas will be conducting a trial that involves pre-implanation genetic diagnosis (which has only been used, until now, to identify serious disabilities and potentially life-threatening conditions) to find out why people might select one sex over another. And people are clamoring to get in: there have already been 50 inquiries from would-be parents asking to participate. Can it really be that this is a worthwhile research question? And are we really including selective termination of "wrong-sex" embryos as part of an empirical research protocol? Read more here.
Rumors have been floating around for some time (see Linda Glenn's earlier blog post re the "GenderMentor" test) that existing direct-to-consumer, mail-order prenatal tests, purportedly designed to help future parents plan for the arrival of their wanted child of either sex (Hmm, shall I buy the pink sleeper or the blue one?), have in fact been used as the basis for sex-based terminations.
Just in case you thought the no-girl-babies problem was something that only happened in other countries. . . .
Thursday, October 27, 2005
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3 comments:
Sex determination for 'variety' seems a bit of a stretch. Enabling people to choose the sex of their child would undoubtedly showcase any gender bias. However, if people are using methods for determination would it cut down the number of sex-based terminations?
Do you see this being preferentially directed at one gender versus another? In China this was evidently the case, would it be here?
One question this does raise is what the difference is (if there is one) between termination of pregnancy for sex selection and selective implantation of embryos for the same reason. As we also see in the stem-cell issue, technology has pushed the boundaries of this question beyond the parameters of the current abortion debate and thoughts about viability.
Re Dave's question about whether sex selection will be preferentially directed at one gender--well, in one way of looking at the question, yeah, the whole point is to choose one over the other (and this is assuming there are only two, which some contend is a false dichotomy--but that's a whole different subject).
I think what you really want to know is whether, in general, the people who use technology to select the sex of a future child will all choose the same way (girls over boys, for example). We don't know the answer to that question yet, and it likely is culturally and familially defined.
There's a tendency to say--in many bioethics issues--that so long as the state isn't mandating a particular choice (whether PGD for sex selection, the specific traits of notional "designer babies," or withdrawal of treatment), then it's purely a matter of self-determination. That is, individuals have the right to do what they want with their bodies. We're getting closer and closer to finding out what limits, if any, Americans think should apply to reproductive freedoms.
A few additional things to ponder. In the US today, more boys than girls are born each year (see CDC report: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/05facts/moreboys.htm) So maybe this technology would actually be used to select for girls. At the same time, there have been some early reports that, while the sex ratio worldwide is stable (with slightly more boys than girls born each year), in some countries the ratio of boys to girls is dropping. At what point would this be an issue? At what point might population imbalances lead to unforseen consequences--like the age of marriage for females, but not males, dropping precipitously?
Stay tuned. . . .
So-called "family balancing" is a reason cited by parents and fertility doctors for sex selection: "We have two boys so we wanted a girl" kind of thing. Just see microsort's statement: http://www.microsort.net/FB.htm. Also, at the First International Conference on Ethics, Science and Moral Philosophy of Assisted Human Reproduction last year in London, many claims were made about how the West was unlikely to go the way of China and India, selecting boys over girls.
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