Some articles on our radar screen this past week...

Autonomy and Authenticity of Enhanced Personality Traits
Abstract: There is concern that the use of neuroenhancements to alter character traits undermines consumer's authenticity. But the meaning, scope and value of authenticity remain vague. However, the majority of contemporary autonomy accounts ground individual autonomy on a notion of authenticity. So if neuroenhancements diminish an agent's authenticity, they may undermine his autonomy. This paper clarifies the relation between autonomy, authenticity and possible threats by neuroenhancements.

Tech-assisted reproduction growing worldwide:
Worldwide report shows increase in assisted reproduction: 250,000 babies (approximately) born in 1 year.
Assisted reproductive technology (ART) is responsible for an estimated 219,000 to 246,000 babies born each year worldwide according to an international study. The study also finds that the number of ART procedures is growing steadily: in just two years (from 2000 to 2002) ART activity increased by more than 25%. As this technology becomes more accessible to more people, will this encourage the ART industry to go further in their efforts and should more regulation be considered?

Boy or Girl? As early as 10 weeks gestation, a new at-home test has an 80% accurate predication rate. But will this result in more female fetuses being terminated?

Sex selection in India ...

It took then-US President Ronald Reagan several years to even mention the word "AIDS," by which time thousands had died and tens of thousands more were infected.

Much in the same way, it has taken Manmohan Singh four years as Prime Minister to finally denounce the wide-spread practice of in utero sex determination and selective abortion of female fetuses in India.

The Lancet once estimated that as many as 10 million female fetuses had been selectively aborted in India between 1986 and 2006. So, we can conservatively guesstimate that approximately 2 million such abortions have occurred since Mr. Singh's election as Prime Minister.

Hopefully the next words out of his mouth will be a clear order to Indian law enforcement agencies to actively implement already existing laws that make the practice of selectively aborting female fetuses illegal, instead of just paying lip-service.

Breakfast - Now Determining the Sex of Your Baby?

When I was in my teens, a few of us used to sit around and daydream about our futures and the families we would have (yes, complete with white picket fences - you can stop laughing any time now). For reasons that I am not really certain of, save to chalk it up to socialized expectations, we always wanted either balanced numbers of children - a boy and a girl, or some combination. But everyone always wanted at least one of each. So, being teens and curious and in the days prior to Google and this fancy "internet" thing that's all the rage these days, we would read books and magazines and whatever else we could get our hands on, scouring for articles on precisely how to best skew the odds in favour of having a baby of the preferred sex.

What time of the month to have sex, what positions were better for X or Y sperm, whether or not the acidity of the vagina changed the longevity of the sperm - we read it all, clipping articles and saving them, writing down the names of books, making photocopies.

I don't remember, really, how much credit we ever gave these ideas. I do, however, remember that we scoffed openly at the idea of what you eat affecting the sex of your child. How naive did the amorphous "they" think we were, anyhow?



Needless to say, it doesn't surprise me that of all the possible wives tales about how to fix the sex of your child, the one that looks to be at least provisionally plausible? What you eat.

A study of 740 first time mothers in Britain shows that whether moms eat breakfast cereal or not might determine whether their bundle of joy is a boy or a girl. ..."Prior to pregnancy, breakfast cereal, but no other item, was strongly associated with infant sex," the researchers write in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. "Women producing male infants consumed more breakfast cereal than those with female infants."

The reason is a mystery, but Mathews speculates that glucose may be key. This type of sugar, converted by the human body into energy, is a by-product of the breakdown of carbohydrates such as those in breakfast cereal. Women who do not eat breakfast tend to have low levels of glucose, and other studies have shown that glucose enhances the growth of male fetuses in vitro.

Lead researcher Fiona Mathews thinks that this might be another way the body gauges whether or not food is plentiful or scarce; in a famine, the less energy intense female fetus makes more sense to biologically invest in, a finding echoed in a lot of animals, which produce more male offspring when food is bountiful. (I would guess it has something to do with future offspring potential - men can create quite a few more children than women, so populations would be checked, to a degree, by having more wombs than sperm.)

But maybe the most interesting thing about the research?

The finding may explain a persistent and puzzling drop in the ratio of male to female births in well-fed industrialized nations, a fact that Mathews ascribes to the decline in the proportion of women eating breakfast.

There's still quite a bit of research that needs to be done, including reproducing it in other countries and cultures, but it's certainly intriguing, as is. And I suppose for those who do want to conceive and are hoping for a specific sex, it's at least a little bit more reliable than much of the stuff I was reading those many years ago.
-Kelly Hills

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Kelly--have to jump in to add this item from The Onion.
~Sue

Sex selection among Asian Americans

An article in the April 1 Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences (abstract) suggests--based on analysis of data from the 2000 Census--that prenatal testing and abortion (as well as, potentially, preimplantation screening) are being used to deliver more male babies to Asian families in the United States. Listen to the story on NPR here, or read the AP story here.

Prior posts on the subject of sex selection (or "family balancing," if you think it's ok to do, or you happen to sell a related service) abound here on the blog: you can search at the top of the page to find them, and to learn about reasons the practice is declining in Korea; its legal status in India; and other aspects.

South Korea Rethinks Asia's Preference for Sons

[Hat tip to Jay Hughes for this article]: We've blogged about the perils of sex selection and the predicament of fewer girls being born in Asian and Indian countries, but this article brings some hopeful news:

"In the early 1990s, among Korean women who had already borne two or more children, the sex imbalance was as high as 206 boys for every 100 girls. In those times, it was common for married Korean men to feel ashamed if they had no sons, some went so far as to divorce wives who did not bear boys." Full article here.