Parents Take a Thorny Ethical Path in Quest to Select Sex of Children
There was a vacancy in Betsy Gilman’s life, an emptiness her lawyer-husband, two sons and a full-time job couldn’t fill.
She wanted a baby girl.
“I didn’t feel like my family was complete or that I was complete,” she said.
So she sought ways to better the 50-50 odds in pre-selecting the sex of her offspring.
As more parents seek the same course, it has touched off an ethical debate that reverberates from church to clinic to laboratory.
It hinges mostly on a sperm-separation technique developed a decade ago by a Montana doctor and is now leased to about 65 clinics worldwide.
Patients come to clinics in the United States, Canada, England, India, Malaysia, Pakistan and Singapore to balance their families or to fulfill cultural pressure to produce boys.
In the United States, the couples are primarily middle-aged, middle-class professionals. Gilman is 42.
The technology involves separating the Y and X chromosomes in the male sperm, followed by artificial insemination with the desired portion. The Y chromosome is male-bearing and the X chromosome is female-bearing.
It is based on evidence that Y chromosome-bearing sperm swim faster than X-bearing sperm, said Dr. Ronald Ericsson of Alzada, Mont., who patented the process.
Washed and spun sperm is layered on increasingly thick albumin protein, through which the strongest sperm swim the fastest.
Producing X-weighted sperm is more difficult, Ericsson said, so fertility drugs are used as a backup.
The process, which costs $300 to $800 per insemination, improves the chance of having a boy by 30% and a girl by 20%, he said.
Ericsson claims that more than 1,500 gender-correct babies have been born using his method.
Others say there is no real evidence the system is effective.
Dr. Francis Byrn, chief of reproductive endocrinology at the University of New Mexico, says he philosophically opposes gender selection and doubts it works.
“If you look very carefully at well-done studies, it isn’t clear to me that you can guarantee an increased chance of males or females,” Byrn said.
But he refers patients who raise the issue to such clinics as Gender Selection of New Mexico, the only facility in the state offering Ericsson’s procedure.
“I think that getting pregnant is a random process and people should enjoy either sex,” Byrn said. “I don’t feel like I ethically can aid or abet a couple in trying to create a pregnancy with a preferential sex.”
Some ethicists and researchers say that while legislating against gender selection would impinge on women’s reproductive rights, the process raises some concerns.
“In the most fundamental sense, selecting the sex of one’s child is a matter of reproductive choice and if we were to limit this . . . then it might invite the floodgates to open up and we might see other aspects of reproductive choice limited,” says Neil Bennett, associate professor of sociology at Yale University and editor of “Sex Selection of Children.”
“However, I would really be very concerned about (parental) motivations if they were to go so far as to use some sex-selection technique,” Bennett said. “Is it that the father has this great desire to play ball with a son? Well, I would argue, why not play ball with your daughters?”
There are also worries that widespread use of gender selection could create an unbalanced society, said Jim Nelson, associate editor for ethical studies at the Hastings Center, a private nonpartisan ethics think tank in Briarcliff Manor, N. Y.
“There is a natural regulator of gender balance and it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see that a rough 50-50 balance is conducive to social harmony generally, and that sex pre-selection, if it became widespread, might have some untoward aspects in terms of upsetting that balance,” Nelson said.
“Some might say it won’t be practiced by enough people to affect the overall ratio or it might not select preponderantly for males, but it’s still worth worrying about. There is an interest in having firstborn males, and that could reinforce advantages already available to boys.”
But a 1989 study by Nan Chico, assistant professor of sociology at Cal State Hayward, found most couples interested in the process already had an average of two children of the same sex and were seeking mixed families.
Chico based her survey on 2,505 letters to Ericsson from couples wanting information on gender selection.
She found 92% had one to seven children and those desiring a firstborn male composed only 1.4% of the total.
Her study showed a nearly 50-50 balance in requests for boys and girls.
“Overwhelmingly, the letters were from people who already had one sex and wanted the other and wanted that to be a last child,” Chico said.
She and others call it the ultimate in family planning.
But Nelson said many are concerned that using sex selection “encourages an overall attitude of consumer choice and quality control.”
“There’s a kind of spirit of loving acceptance that is an important part of what children need . . . and that may be in some way subtly undermined by the notion that we can expect a certain amount of tailoring, fine-tuning, on the kids we get,” Nelson said.
However, he said, “the difficulty is justifying limits on people’s liberties in the name of worrisome possibilities as opposed to demonstrated harm.”
Most see a medical value in the technology when used to try to prevent the passage of some 200 sex-linked diseases, such as Duchenne muscular dystrophy and hemophilia, which are transmitted through the female.
But many fear the process could lead to abortion when the preferred sex is not conceived.
The religious community tends to oppose gender selection.
Rabbi David M. Feldman of the Teaneck (N. J.) Jewish Center, a specialist on Jewish law and medicine, says that although pre-selection does not necessarily violate Jewish law, “it doesn’t seem to be in the spirit of general acceptance. . . . The idea is to be grateful for children of both genders.”
The U. S. Catholic Conference compares gender selection to Hitler’s genocidal drive for a master race.
“The church does not believe in interfering with the natural process. That is not something that should be manipulated by the human race,” said conference spokesman Deacon Chris Baumann in Washington, D.C.
Ericsson dismisses such “hand-wringing and objections.”
“Some think we’re going to have this violent Clint Eastwood-type world, but the people who do this (gender selection) are parents,” said Ericsson, although he acknowledges most requests in Asian and Middle Eastern clinics are for boys.
