Slashdot Mirror
UK Report Suggests Designer Offspring
chromakey writes "Several news agencies are reporting that the UK is considering allowing parents undergoing fertility treatment to select the sex of their unborn babies." Also covered in Q&A format by the BBC. From the article: "At the moment in the UK, sex selection is only permitted if there are strict medical reasons. This could be because there is a serious sex-linked disorder in the family, such as Duchenne's Muscular Dystrophy."
You've obviously never been to the West Midlands...
The opponents to this actually directly mentioned "Brave New World".
In many developing countries, it is possible to find hundreds of "sonogram clinics" on the street. Pregnant women go into the clinic in order to find out the sex of the child. If the child is female, there is a high likeliehood that the child will be aborted.
People have been able to shift the sex ratio for years. All you need is a centrifuge and the appropriate density gradient. Since the Y chromosome is much smaller than the X, Y sperm are significantly more buoyant than X sperm (nearly a 10% difference) and can be separated from one another and used for artificial insemination.
The only difference here is that they verify sex by PCR so that it now works 100% of the time instead of only 90.
I'm no British law expert but the old method was probably perfectly legal as it would be difficult to mandate what one can do with semen (your disgusting imagination may be inserted here).
I can hear "Every Sperm is Sacred" now....
and banning it.
In a Developing Society (like China), having a wife and many children is very important. What do you do with the thousands of Chinese men that will not have wives and children? Those men feel cultural pressure to get a wife, at any cost.
This isn't about eugenics. This isn't about designer babies with parents choosing the colour of their offsprings' eyes, hair, etc. This is about parents who find it impossible to conceive naturally and who have limited opportunities to do so with the help of modern science being able to have some say if they child that they have is the boy or girl that they've always wanted.
We're talking about giving parents who might have dreamt about having a child of a specific gender the chance to have that dream come true. And we're not talking about giving that choice to everyone, we're talking about giving it to those who won't be able to try, try and try again until that boy or girl comes along. And, if it needs saying, most parents desperate for a kid won't care what gender their baby is, they'll be happy to let nature decide.
Remember also that IVF conceptions often result in multiple births, normally with non-identical twins or triplets, so the chances are that this sort of selection will only be necessary in a small number of cases. And, of course, IVF conceptions are a small fraction of the total number of pregnancies that occur, which means that we're definitely talking about thousands of kids every year.
Lastly, I'd like to add that IVF treatment is provided for free by the NHS. Of course, not everyone needs it but at least those people who can't conceive naturally don't have to choose between trying for a baby and having a positive bank balance.
So, any chance of cutting down on the some of the knee-jerk, distopic comments now?
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Alternatively, this could make them a illegally traded commodity. I'm not saying that I disagree with your original points, but when something is desireable and in short supply underground markets often develop to illegally trade this commodity.
Actually, Birmingham came dead last in a survey of accent popularity in the UK a few years back. Apparently it gives the impression that we are stupid. You know what I blame? That British Gas advert ("we wanna be togevva").
Course, some people really like it. My last gf loved my Brummie accent. There are some twisted, twisted people about.
You don't have to wait. In India and China the sex imbalance has been growing for over a decade. The peasants used to just smother unwanted girls at birth, now the middle class has ultrasounds and aborts them. That's one reason why there is a market for kidnapping and selling women to be wives of men in rural areas where there aren't enough to go around.
China grapples with legacy of its 'missing girls' "From a relatively normal ratio of 108.5 boys to 100 girls in the early 80s, the male surplus progressively rose to 111 in 1990, 116 in 2000, and is now is close to 120 boys for each 100 girls at the present time"
Ratio of girls to boys in India continues to decline "The sex ratio, calculated as number of girls per 1000 boys in the 0-6 age group, declined from 945 girls per 1000 boys in the 1991 census to 927 during the 2001 census... In 2001, four states--Punjab, Haryana, Himachal, and Gujarat--fell into the category of having fewer than 800 girls per 1000 boys for the first time. In Punjab the decline was in 10 of the 17 districts, whereas in Haryana state almost all districts recorded fewer than 850 girls. In Fatehgarh, in Punjab, the number of girls declined to 754 per 1000 boys."
China doesn't have the one child law because of a gender imbalance; the one child law has resulted in a gender imbalance.
DNA just wants to be free...
Actually, it's also because of inherent flaws in the Y-chromosome. Males are also more likely to die of things like hemophilia and other such predominently male diseases.
And actually, in modern countries with modern medicine, enough boys die by age 15 to even things out and after that, there are more females, which makes most populations have a female majority. (The US is about 0.97 males to each female overall, with about 5% more males being born. Over the course of a life, that's an 8% deficit.)
Be glad life is unfair, otherwise we'd deserve all this.