Stardate 20010705.0640 (On Screen): A technology has become available which permits people to choose the sex of their children, or so this claims. Actually, such technologies have been available for years; the difference in this case is that it becomes possible before fertilization. It takes advantage of the weight difference between a sperm cell which carries an X chromosome and one which carries a Y chromosome; presumably it involves a centrifuge. The article contains some scientific innaccuracies, which is unfortunate. For instance, it is not the case that "genetic illnesses usually affect only boys." That is true for some diseases such as hemophilia because the gene which causes the disease is on the X chromosome. Since a girl has two of them but a boy only has one, if the one he gets is bad then he's in trouble. A girl has to have the bad gene on both her X chromosomes (which means her father had to be hemophiliac). But other genetic diseases, such as sickle cell anemia, are not X-linked, appear equally in both sexes, and are quite common. Sickle cell anemia is far more common than hemophila, in fact. Worse, someone named Lord Winston, who ought to know better, is trying to claim that this procedure could itself cause genetic damage. That's unlikely, if for no other reason than because the kind of damage it would cause would be such as to prevent the fertilized egg from being viable. Major damage is possible but would not lead to a child. Minor, heritable damage is very unlikely.
The real reason that this technology is dangerous is not due to side effects, but rather due to its actual primary effect: sex selection of children. The article emphasizes that it would be used to select female children, but if it goes into general use that's not usually how it's really going to get used. What would actually happen is to increase the ratio of boys. The cultural effects of a substantial change in the sex-ratio among babies is impossible to predict, but even without this technology we're going to find out, because it's happening now in India. Using the older techniques of ultrasound and abortion (or the yet older "technology" of infanticide), people there are selecting for boy-children (for a number of complicated cultural reasons).
That hasn't really started happening in Europe or the US yet, but if it becomes possible to select a child's sex pre-fertilization, there are a lot of people here who will find that to be morally acceptable, and we'll see the same shift. That is unacceptable, and it's going to have to be controlled by law. The solution is that this procedure, even if it works, must be limited to a clinical setting and only given to people who have a familial history of X-linked diseases. This is just the first droplet of a coming ethical rain storm. (discuss)
