In this essay I will argue about how sex selection may help parents with sex linked diseases to have healthy children. Moreover, I will refute the claims that sex selection leads to both a distortion in sex ratio, and to the creation of designer babies.
Choosing your Baby’s Sex
Choosing the sex of a future child or deciding not to choose is no longer a hypothetical issue. Thanks to the new genetic engineering technologies such as Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis (PGD), one can select the sex of their baby. According to Akchurin, et.al, “PGD is a technology that tests the chromosomes of an embryo to determine genetic abnormalities and gender before being placed in the womb” (Akchurin 2002:21). The use of this technology was first developed, “to identify and prevent sex-linked disorders in children”
(Akchurin 2002:21) but nowadays it can be used for sex selection per se. It has long been argued whether sex selection should be allowed. It is my contention that sex election should be permitted to parents going under in vitro fertilization treatment. In this essay I will argue about how sex selection may help parents with sex linked diseases to have healthy children. Moreover, I will refute the claims that sex selection leads to both a distortion in sex ratio, and to the creation of “designer babies”.
Gender selection can dramatically reduce the chances of transmitting a sex linked disease to a child. Sex linked diseases, such as hemophilia and muscular dystrophy, are caused by mutations in genes carried on the X chromosome. According to Patrick Hopkins (1998), women are much less likely to suffer genetic diseases than men. Hopkins states that, on average, “two of every thousand males would have the disease, but only 0.2 per cent of females would carry the defective gene and would not be sick” (Hopkins 1998:129). Hopkins (1998) explains that while an affected man always passes his abnormal genes to all his daughters, he never does it to his sons. In turn, the woman who has the sex-linked gene will pass that gene to half of her sons. Therefore, the family with the carrier mother will be at risk for the disease. Such a family should be permitted to select a female child, who will have fewer possibilities of getting sick than a male child (Hopkins 1998:129-30).