Pick a Sex, Any Sex
Some couples will do anything to guarantee a boy or a girl.
by Jeanne Sager
August 14, 2008
Maureen and her husband already had two little boys when they paid more than $5,000 for MicroSort in 2000. After his sperm was spun in a centrifuge to separate X- and Y-chromosome-bearing swimmers by the miniscule difference in the mass of the DNA, the desired product was injected into Maureen's uterine cavity through a catheter. She got pregnant with twins on her first try — a boy and the girl she'd always wanted.
Most fertility practitioners advocate IVF with MicroSort because it ups the chances of a successful pregnancy, but the couple wasn't comfortable with the destruction of the "unwanted" male embryos the process could create. Using intrauterine insemination, the only thing destroyed was some of Maureen's husband's sperm.
"In any pregnancy, only one in a billion sperm survives to make a baby anyway, so ethically we found no harm in discarding unwanted sperm," she said.
Reproductive public health educator Evelina Sterling, PhD, worries couples using these methods for sex selection are playing right into the hands of right-wing lawmakers.
Is sex selection playing into the hands of right-wing lawmakers?
And she's not playing Chicken Little. Georgia, where she lives, is one of a list of states that have tried to have the rights of the zygote paramount to the rights of its parents. If such a law were to pass, it could be tantamount to a reversal of Roe v. Wade.
Georgia Republican Rep. Paul Broun introduced what he calls the Sanctity of Human Life Act to the House (H.R. 4157) last November in an attempt to make the federal government recognize "each human life begins with fertilization, cloning, or its functional equivalent, at which time every human has all legal and constitutional attributes and privileges of personhood." He's earned fifty-five co-sponsors in the House — including six other Georgia Republicans and Republican Congressmen in nineteen other states and Puerto Rico.
"That kind of bad connotation of using these treatments for gender selection purposes affects access to fertility treatment as a whole as an unintended consequence," Sterling said.
Careful not to condemn the process as a whole, Sterling said she's yet to see enough research. "I don't think the ethics and social implications have caught up with the science," she said.
©2008 Jeanne Sager and Babble
About the Author
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Jeanne Sager is a freelance writer and photographer living in upstate New York with her husband and daughter, Jillian. She maintains a blog of her award-winning columns at jeannesager.blogspot.com. |
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