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."
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....
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."