A lot of couples are trying to conceive a child, and they have at least some thought of whether they want a boy or a girl. These preferences have made some resort to some surefire methods, from taking vitamins to timing when a couple will have sex in order to influence the gender of the child.
But with the growing popularity of in-vitro fertilization, or IVF, more and more couples are gaining the ability to determine, with 100 percent certainty, the gender of their baby.
Choosing a baby's gender through IVF
There are questions on whether or not couples should be given the option to choose the gender of their child and the consequences of them choosing the gender is still unknown. Doctors have been thinking about this for years. In 1999, a professional organization, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, held the opinion that using IVF for sex selection should not be encouraged.
But in 2018, the group eased its stance as they urged clinicians to create their own policies as to whether or not they should offer the service in their practice. But there are concerns that experts and the general public have over sex selection.
It is not safe for the embryo
IVF does not reveal anything, at least on its own, about the sex of the embryo. In the conventional method, a doctor retrieves the eggs of a woman and fertilizes them in a Petri dish. After letting the resulting embryos grow for a couple of days, the doctor looks at them under the microscope and implants one or more of the embryos that appear to be most viable in the woman.
But over the last two decades, women and couples have increasingly had the option of adding a screening step to the IVF cycle. This can help determine a lot about the embryos, including the gender. In 2013, around six percent of IVF procedures involved screening for specific diseases. A survey of clinics done in 2008 in America found that 74 percent offer the service.
One type of general screening, known as preimplantation genetic screening, or PGS, involves taking one cell from the embryo and looking at its chromosomes. The rest of the embryo is frozen while doctors carry out the test. It also helps doctors know which embryos are most viable and rule out the chromosomal abnormalities responsible for conditions like Turner syndrome and Down syndrome.
According to Dr. Mark Sauer, the chief of the division of reproductive endocrinology and infertility at Columbia University Medical Center, some doctors have argued that manipulating the embryo in order to do the screening carries intrinsic risk to the embryo.
Even though there are these concerns, there is no evidence that it is unsafe. But when you have millions of babies who were screened in this way, you get less and less concerned that you are doing harm.
It could lead to gender bias
In America, there is no evidence that giving couples the option of selecting the sex of their child could lead to a surplus of boys and girls. Sauer said that there is discrimination against women, but he does not sense in the practice of assisted reproductive technology that there is an overwhelming bias toward one sex or the other.
There are some concerns, particularly in some Asian countries, about societies valuing boys more than girls. However, according to Brendan Foht, the assistant editor of The New Atlantic, a journal that publishes articles by experts and the public on bio-ethical issues, that to some extent, this could be a cultural stereotype.
Numerous countries, including Canada and the United Kingdom, have placed bans on sex selection of babies for social uses. This is opposed to when sex selection is used to avoid the risk of sex-linked diseases like Duchenne muscular dystrophy, which mainly affects boys. However, ethicists have challenged these types of bans, and they argued that sex selection will not lead to gender imbalance in the population.
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