Picking Baby’s Sex Gets Support

The ethics chairman for a group that sets fertility clinic standards says it is ethical for certain couples to choose the sex of their children for nonmedical reasons, by picking only male or female embryos to be implanted.

The decision, in a letter written to one of the country’s largest infertility businesses, prompted that clinic to announce it would offer sex selection at its offices in Chicago and New York.

“I could pull out a list of 30 to 40 couples, instantly, who in the last two to three months have asked about this,” Dr. Norbert Gleicher of the Center for Human Reproduction said Friday, explaining why he sought the ethics ruling from the American Society for Reproductive Medicine.

But the decision surprised many reproductive specialists, and the ethics group, whose policies are followed by most fertility clinics, began backing away from the thorny issue.

The letter represents the opinion of ethics committee chairman John A. Robertson, not a ruling by the entire ethics committee, said Dr. Robert Rebar, the group’s associate executive director. Thus, the organization’s previous policy discouraging sex selection stands until and unless the entire committee decides otherwise at its next meeting in January, he said.

Robertson, a University of Texas ethicist, did not return a call seeking comment.

Critics long have considered gender selection for nonmedical reasons a form of sex discrimination and the start of a slippery slope toward choosing children on the basis of other traits such as coloring or intelligence. Some say it’s simply unnecessarily risky.

But in May, the ethics group took its first step toward lifting the prohibition on nonmedical sex selection: It published a policy saying that, under certain conditions, doctors could offer preconception sex selection services to families who already have children and now want another baby of the opposite gender. How? By separating out sperm more likely to produce boys or girls and then using the preferred sperm for artificial insemination.

That’s an experimental technique that works about 70% of the time when picking boys and 85% of the time when picking girls, Gleicher said.

However, when couples undergo in vitro fertilization--eggs and sperm are combined in a lab dish to create an embryo--specialists can tell with almost 100% accuracy which embryos are male or female by genetically testing a single cell. Fertility clinics long have used this technique to help couples at high risk of bearing children with gender-linked genetic diseases to pick which embryo to have implanted.

So Gleicher asked the group why it considered nonmedical sex selection ethical when performed by the less accurate sperm method and not the more accurate embryo-testing method.