Gender Selection and PGD
It has been the wish of monarchy, since time immemorial to be able to select the gender of their progeny. A king in particular would generally want a male heir or two. However even the common man or woman has had a yearning to be able to select the gender of their offspring. Whether you believe it is ethical or not, it has always been a pipe dream for human kind.
An elementary form of gender selection became available in the 1970.s. The Ericsson method as it known had 69+ percent success rate for both boys and girls, although the success rate was slightly higher for boys. That still left an approximately 30% failure rate. With the advent of PGD that success rate has rocketed to more than 90%. Bear in mind that this success rate has nothing to do with conception success, only that once you conceive the likelihood of getting your selected gender is 90% or greater. Recent improvements in PGD - Pre-implantation genetic diagnosis has led to success rates approaching 100%. Which, is staggering!
Originally Gender selection using PGD was only used for Medical Reasons, this is known as medical gender selection and was a way to avoid certain inherited disease like; muscular dystrophy, haemophilia and cystic fibrosis. Another reason for gender selection was for psychological reasons. A person might feel they are more able to cope with a certain gender as a child.
However as most things medical they eventually become Elective. This has caused quite a lot of controversy and really has polarised the community. This non medical form of gender selection can be used to balance out the sex representation with in a family unit and is often cited as the reason to request gender selection. The controversy surrounding any kind of gender selection seems to stem from the perception that male babies are preferred than female although many studies have shown that statistics do not reflect this perception. When China introduced the one child policy, there were horrific stories of female babies being left to die. This was a form of gender selection and the fear was that something similar would happen with PGD. However without such a prohibitive policy gender selection will not favour one sex or the other.
The mechanics of gender selection and PGD are unusually simple. The following steps are basically taken.
- Embryo.s are created from the sperm cells of the male partner and the egg.s of the female partner. Assuming of course this is being undertaken by a couple.
- After the 3rd day, the embryo.s will have reached 6 to 8 cells and one cell will be hived off.
- An analysis of the chromosomal composition of the cell is undertaken
- From this analysis we are able to determine the gender of the embryo.
IVF clinics around the USA are starting to offer gender selection as part of their IVF portfolio. The ethical concerns seem to be waning and the debate on selecting gender, although not completely halted has definitely slowed down. The future of ivf and pgd and gender selection in general seems to be a flourishing one. For better or worse gender selection is here to stay.