Sex Selection Goes
Mainstream
By Marcy Darnovsky,
AlterNet September 25, 2003
Several times
over the past few months, a small but striking
ad from a Virginia-based fertility clinic has
appeared in the Sunday Styles section of the New
York Times. Alongside a smiling baby, its
boldface headline asks, "Do You Want To Choose
the Gender Of Your Next Baby?"
If so, the ad
continues, you can join "prospective
parents...from all over the world" who come to
the Genetics & IVF Institute (GIVF) for an
"exclusive scientifically-based sperm
sorting gender selection procedure." The
technique, known by the trademarked name
MicroSort, is offered as a way to choose a girl
or boy either for the "prevention of genetic
diseases" (selecting against the sex affected by
an X-linked or Y-linked condition) or for
"family balancing" (selecting for a girl in a
family that already has one or more boys, or
vice versa).
GIVF has been
promoting MicroSort on its Web site for several
years, and a few other fertility clinics offer
other "family balancing" methods online. But the
MicroSort ads in the New York Times represent a
bolder and higher-profile approach. They mark
the first time that high-tech methods for sex
selection, and their use for clearly social
purposes, have been openly marketed in a
mainstream US publication.
Two years ago,
when newspapers aimed at Indian expatriates in
the United States and Canada carried fertility
clinic ads for sex selection, the Times covered
the event as a news story. The article included
hard-hitting criticism from Indian feminists in
the United States, and discussed the hugely
skewed sex ratios in South and East Asia (some
demographers estimate as many as 100 million
"missing girls") that are the result of female
infanticide, neglect of girl babies, and
prenatal diagnosis followed by sex-selective
abortion. It noted that the sex-selection ads
would be illegal in India, and reported that one
of the publications dropped them after
controversy erupted.
The Times has
also covered other aspects of the debate about
sex selection. To date, however, it has taken no
note of the MicroSort ad campaign. Nor have
other newspapers.
The
Marketing Tactics
GIVF's ads note
that MicroSort sperm sorting is currently
"investigational," and is being used in the
context of an FDA clinical trial. But the
company is marketing the procedure with a
classic consumer come-on: It promises "FREE
MicroSort for qualifying patients" who sign up
for either its "Donor Egg" or "Preimplantation
Genetic Diagnosis" program. GIVF repeats the
offer in a pop-up ad on its MicroSort website,
where another smiling baby sits in front of a
pink-and-blue double helix.
Both egg
"donation" and pre-implantation genetic
diagnosis, or PGD (in which embryos are produced
outside the body, and then screened and selected
for genetic characteristics) require that women
undergo an invasive egg-harvesting procedure.
Sex selection via sperm sorting is usually
accomplished by artificial insemination, and so
doesn't require egg harvesting or in vitro
fertilization. GIVF's offer can thus be read as
luring women to undergo riskier (and in the case
of PGD, more expensive) procedures.
The
MicroSort Story
The technology
behind MicroSort was developed in the late 1980s
by a government scientist at the US Department
of Agriculture for use in producing livestock.
In 1992, USDA granted GIVF founder Dr. Joseph
Schulman an exclusive US license to apply the
method in humans for the patent's full 17-year
life. The first MicroSort baby was born in 1995.
GIVF's Schulman
is not only a technical and entrepreneurial
pioneer of sex selection, but also an early
popularizer of the notion of "family balancing."
The concept has been floated in assisted
reproduction circles as a justification for sex
selection at least since the early 1990s.
According to the website Word Spy, which traces
the origins and usage of recently coined words
and phrases, the earliest use of the term in the
mainstream media was a quote from Schulman in a
1994 Fortune article.
"Family
balancing" is, of course, an application of
high-tech sex selection with considerable
commercial potential. GIVF's base charge for
MicroSort is $2300; couples try an average of
three times before a pregnancy is achieved or
they drop out. When Fortune followed up on
MicroSort in 2001 with a long article, it quoted
an analyst at OrbiMed Advisors, an asset
management firm focused on the "global
healthcare industry," who estimated a market for
sperm sorting in the US alone of "between $200
million and $400 million, if [it] is
aggressively marketed".
The
Fertility Industry's Trade Organization
It's difficult
to imagine that such projections did not play
some role in a 2001 decision by the American
Society of Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) – the
fertility industry's trade organization – to
give an ethical go-ahead to sperm sorting for
"family balancing." A report by its Ethics
Committee noted but overrode a range of social
and ethical objections, including those that led
to its rejection, just two years earlier, of
using PGD for such purposes. In that earlier
report, ASRM explicitly acknowledged that both
PGD and sperm sorting have "the potential
to reinforce gender bias in a society".
ASRM remains
officially opposed to the use of PGD for "family
balancing." While GIVF's website heralds ASRM's
blessing of sperm sorting for "family
balancing," it fails to mention the trade
organization's disapproval of PGD for this
purpose. Of course, adherence to ASRM guidelines
is purely voluntary, and they are regularly
flouted (for example, GIVF is not the only US
fertility business openly offering PGD for
"family-balancing" on the Internet). But the
existence of the guidelines is often cited as an
argument against effective regulation of the
assisted reproduction industry.
Global
Effects
There are no
legislative limits on the applications of PGD or
sperm sorting in the United States. In a
significant number of other countries, however,
legislative or regulatory prohibitions on
"non-medical" sex selection procedures are in
place or pending. The Council of Europe's
Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine
explicitly forbids them. But new methods of
sperm sorting and the promotion of "family
balancing" in the US are sure to affect
practices and policies worldwide. If Americans
start controlling the sex of their children,
people and policy makers in other parts of the
world will take note.
South Asian
feminists, for example, assert that any
increased acceptance of sex selection in the US
will legitimize its use and seriously aggravate
urgent problems for women in societies where
preference for sons is strong. They point to the
persistence of female infanticide, neglect of
girls, and sex-selective abortions, even in
countries such as India with laws against them,
and to the prevalence of violence against women
who fail to give birth to sons.
"An abusive
spouse may use the birth of a daughter as a
pretext for violence towards his wife, and then
be violent towards the unwanted daughter," says
a fact sheet on sex selection prepared for a
national conference later this month of South
Asian women living in the US. Even Fortune
recognizes the gravity of the problem. "It is
hard to overstate the outrage and indignation
that MicroSort prompts in people who spend their
lives trying to improve women's lot overseas,"
its reporter notes.
What
Technology Can Do; What Technology Should Do
High-tech sex
selection poses a range of difficult policy
dilemmas – especially the problem of addressing
it without in any way weakening women's rights
and access to abortion. But address it we must,
because of the grave concerns it raises about
exacerbating sexism and gender stereotyping,
undermining disability rights, putting children
at risk (if the child turns out to be the
"wrong" sex or the "wrong kind" of girl or boy),
skewing sex ratios or the number of firstborn
boys, and setting the stage for a consumer
eugenics in which parents are sold techniques to
select not just their child's sex, but a range
of other traits as well. As the UK-based NGO
Human Genetics Alert asks, if we allow sex
selection, how will we be able effectively "to
oppose `choice' of...appearance, height,
intelligence?. The door to 'designer babies'
will not have been opened a crack – it will have
been thrown wide open."
Of course,
there are many reasons that people may wish for
a daughter instead of a son, or a boy rather
than a girl. But compelling though some of these
longings may be, the issue raised by sex
selection is not primarily one of the rightness
or wrongness of parental desires. The
preferences of prospective parents are obviously
relevant in matters of child-bearing, but so are
the well-being of future children, and the
social consequences of a set of technologies
that are certain to be "aggressively marketed."
From a social
and political perspective, the paramount
question is this: If new technologies make it
possible to fulfill desires and satisfy
preferences, is that reason enough to use them?
More succinctly: If we can, does that mean we
ought?
