For $19,000, It's a Boy!

I remember an old anecdote about sex prediction in pregnancy. A doctor -- who is always 100 percent correct -- predicts a boy, then writes down "girl" on a piece of paper he puts in his desk. If a boy is born, he's correct. If a girl is born, he pulls out the paper and convinces the mother he knew all along it was a girl.

Today, the process of sex prediction works almost as well as the doctor's trick due to a high tech and very reliable method of sex (or gender) selection. As many of us learned in Biology 101, gender is determined by male sperm which carry either an X or Y chromosome. The female egg always has an X chromosome. So, for a boy (XY chromosome), the egg must be fertilized by a sperm carrying a Y chromosome; and for a girl, by a sperm carrying an X chromosome.

How do you get the right sperm to fertilize the egg? Simple.You go to a fertility treatment center, such as The Fertility Institutes, to have the male's sperm sorted by chromosome.  This is done in a procedure called PGD (Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis) which may also be used to determine other genetic characteristics, some of which might signal serious genetic disease. Next, in most cases, you fertilize the egg through IVF (in vitro fertilization) with X or Y chromosome sperm and then implant an egg with the "right" sperm into the uterus.  At The Fertility Institutes, the cost for PGD is a mere $18,490 which includes an IVF fee.  The Institutes claim a 99.99 percent success rate.

PGD/IVF Is Not All That Easy

The Web site for The Fertility Institutes presents three case studies for PGD which provide some idea of how complex the procedure is.  You can't isolate a single sperm; you need to do an implantation with millions of sperm.  But how many millions?

The first case study involved an American couple that had three girls and wanted a boy.  Of the male's 42 million sperm per ejaculation, only 28 percent carried the male chromosome. The institute decided that 12 million sperm with Y chromosomes was not enough "for a reasonable chance with simple sperm selection and insemination."  So the couple had to have an IVF which ultimately delivered to them a boy baby.

In the second case study, a British couple that had three boys discovered the male had 38 percent or 34 million sperm with X chromosomes, enough for a normal insemination.  The result was 3 healthy female embryos and 7 healthy male embryos as determined by the Institute. Two female embryos were implanted which resulted in a successful pregnancy for the birth of a girl. I had to ask myself what happened to the other healthy embryos. Shouldn't the right-to-life movement be on a crusade against the disposal of "wrong" sex embryos?

In the last case, a Canadian couple with three girls had decided, after the last birth, on tubal ligation.  Then they changed their minds and decided they had to have a boy. They got one $19,000 later.

Why Do I Find Sex Selection So Offensive?

First, it's obvious that the overwhelming majority of people, especially those from traditional cultures, will select to have boys rather than girls.  The process of sex selection in less technologically advanced cultures is usually the abortion of a female fetus as determined by ultrasound.  Sex selection has produced extraordinary and dangerous imbalances in gender ratios in India, China and many other countries where there are far more males than females. The sex selection process is so offensive to Indian advocates (where sex selection is against the law but not enforced) that they have sued Google and Yahoo for carrying sex selection advertising on their Web sites.

Although it would be hard to obtain the data, I suspect that even in the Western world most PGD is done to identify male sperm.

Second, PGD contributes to overpopulation.  In each of the case studies above, PGD was performed after three normal births.  Aren't three children enough even if they are all the same sex?

Finally, what about adoption? There are millions of children of both sexes waiting for families. For roughly the same amount of money, a couple could adopt a child of the sex they were hungering for and lessen the world's problems instead of adding to the population.

PGD/IVF seems to me to be a technological innovation that is helping the world go backwards.


For more information on high tech sex selection, go to www.fertility-docs.com

NB  I have written two reproductiion pieces this month because the subjects seemed more interesting than the political news, but I will get back to politics at the start of the Democratic Convention!