According to British newspaper, The Guardian, fertility specialists at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas have been given the "green light" for a "clinical trial into the effects of allowing couples to choose the sex of their babies."
Researchers will use PGD (pre-implantation genetic diagnosis) to determine whether the human embryos are male or female and then only implant children of the desired sex.
In a lame attempt to make child sex selection more ethical, researchers will only accept "couples who have already had one child and want another of the opposite sex."
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Kevin,
ReplyDeleteFirst, the objective of my post was not to prove how sex selection for children is wrong - it was to inform about this research. I thought that was fairly obvious since I never make an argument for why sex selection is wrong.
Your major objection to sex selection maybe "sex ratios" but mine is not. Mine is treating human beings as if they were some kind of merchandise where we take and choose what we like or don't like. Where the individuals involved place more value on some of their embryonic children because of sex. What is lame is that making the ratios roughtly even doesn't really make this research ethical and it's a lame attempt to make this research sound reasonable. The researchers have tried to avoid the question of whether intentionally discriminating based on sex is wrong by acting like no discrimination is taking place when it clearly is in each individual case.
The overall end result being neutral doesn't mean there isn't a large amount of discrimination going on. Each set of parents is discriminating against a certain sex regardless of whether or not the ratio ends up being 50/50.
All IVF procedures don't necessarily need to end up with unimplanted embryos. This research might even require more embryos to be created and therefore more embryos who won't be implanted. If a couple wants a child of a specific sex and the researchers need X number of female children then it's probable that more embryos will have to be created so they'll have the necessary X of female embryos when they'd usually just desire X number of total embryos (male and female).