Monday, June 19, 2006 | 7:01 a.m.
Wealthy foreign couples seeking to have children are increasingly coming to the United States for medical procedures that allow them to choose whether they will conceive a girl or a boy.
According to a recent Associated Press story, these couples come to America because such procedures are banned in their countries. Australia, Britain, Canada, China and many European nations ban the procedures that allow couples to choose their child's sex. Some make allowances for gender selection of embryos in cases where parents want to avoid passing on a sex-specific disease - hemophilia in boys, for example.
But in some countries, such as China, preferring a boy over a girl is cultural, rather than medical, in nature. Boys have long been considered wage earners who can support their parents in old age, and sons, not daughters, traditionally secure a parent's place in the afterlife. A girl's value, however, is absorbed by her husband's family when she marries. In some cultures, parents also must pay a dowry when a daughter weds. So many Chinese couples want boys.
China has also enforced a one-child-only policy since the 1980s, so girls often die of neglect at birth or soon after - if they are allowed to be born at all. Last year China also banned ultrasounds, which couples were using to determine the gender of their fetuses and aborting the females.
But these couples are now coming to clinics such as the Fertility Institutes of Los Angeles and Las Vegas where for $20,000 they buy a 99.99 percent chance of having the baby they want, AP reports. Jeffrey Steinberg, a physician at the institute, told AP that the procedure is "scary. We understand that." The institute's Web site generates 140,000 hits monthly from China.
Some question whether it is ethical. In 2001 the American Society for Reproductive Medicine studied the issue and concluded that such selection has "the potential for inherent gender discrimination" and allows for "inappropriate control over nonessential characteristics of children." They recommended gender selection be used only to avoid passing on disease or to add diversity to a couple with existing children.
A 2005 U.N. report that examined the global birth rates of boys and girls concluded that 200 million women and girls are demographically "missing," and infanticide because of gender preference is a major reason. It is ethically bankrupt that U.S. physicians and fertility clinics would seek to cultivate a lucrative new market in cultures that embrace this disgraceful brand of discrimination.
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