I find this outrageous. It's as though the Western Enlightenment had never happened! It's as though John Locke had never written his Second Treatise of Government in which he stated that government should be the servant of men and not the other way round. It's as though Voltaire hadn't spread the word in France and fanned the flames right across Europe. It's one thing for governments to take decisions to regulate this or that when undesirable things start happening. But here we a quasi-governmental committee making decisions on events before they've happened and before they have any idea whatsoever what the outcome might have been. In this case, the HFEA are also entering the bedroom -- something they would never do in the case of homosexuality. (The fact that the separation of sperm into male and female sperm is a laboratory task at present is beside the point. It is quite feasible that, if there were the demand, a miniature centrifuge could be manufactured and sold as quite a normal consumer good, like a contraceptive, so that it could be used in the bedroom.)
If this became law, it would only encourage many couples to break the law, or to evade the law by going abroad for sperm separation. In the following piece by Michael Prowse, written in a more moderate tone than I've been able to muster so far, he writes:
Well, I think it's a little more brutal than that. For centuries in agricultural countries, baby girls have been drowned at birth -- that is, long before amniocentesis methods were available. Twenty years ago in China, it was believed that something like 20 million per annum were -- and this was not due to the government's single-child policy either because the boy-girl ratio would not have been different from the norm, which is about 104-100. And it happened in India, too -- another 20 or so million girls a year also failed to materialise on the morning after a birth. I don't know whether it continues.
Besides, in the western world, there are much more serious events which are affecting child birth. In the last 20 years or so, widespread homosexuality has been tolerated. Thus, in England, something like two million men will never become fathers. And then there are another two million or so men who, following the trend that is already even more serious in Japan and Italy, are now remaining bachelors and staying at home with Mom because it's cheaper to live that way. (Of course, there may be a considerable amount of double-counting in these two instances.) And then, there are millions of women who delay marriage until it's either too late to risk having children interfering with their careers or, if they marry at the normal age, still decide to have only one child instead of the two or three that were usual only a generation ago.
Goodness knows, there are already enough highly significant changes taking place voluntarily which are affecting the birth rate so that, in effect, developed countries' populations are committing suicide, without the moralistic do-gooders interfering in something that would probably only make a marginal difference. I might be wrong. If free choice continues and not made illegal, perhaps every couple will decide to have a boy only. Or perhaps a girl. Or perhaps sex determination might have a highly desirable effect of encouraging parents to have two children -- a boy and a girl -- and thus start getting the population back onto a self-sustaining basis, instead of the 1 point something that will cause a population collapse in three or four decades' time. (And when that starts to happen it will be almost impossible to reverse it unless babies are eggs are fertilised and incubated on an industrial scale in laboratories.)
I find the decision of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority offesnive, oppressive and entirely against the trend of the philosophical and scientific enlightenment which has informed western society in the last 300 years and which, in fact, produced the modern medical establishment which is now preaching at us. More than that, threatening to persuade their pals in government to lock us up.
Keith Hudson
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PARENTS SHOULD HAVE THE RIGHT TO CHOOSE THE SEX OF THEIR CHILDREN
Michael Prowse
Tony Blair's government believes that it is unethical to try to influence the sex of your offspring. In fact it has gone further. Instead of merely voicing its disapproval of new American techniques such as "sperm sorting", it plans to make them illegal. "So long as I am secretary of state for health," thundered John Reid this week, "sex selection will be permitted only on compelling medical grounds." He will allow British couples to select for sex to prevent rare genetic disorders such as haemophilia, but not for such frivolous reasons as "family balancing".
Mr Reid was following the advice of Britain's Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, which defended its decision mainly on the grounds that consultations revealed strong public opposition. In a Mori poll, 69 per cent of people said couples should not be permitted to select the sex of their babies, except on medical grounds, while only 15 per cent were in favour (the remainder had no opinion). Among the 600 individuals or bodies responding to the HFEA's consultation paper, there was even greater hostility. More than 80 per cent opposed sex selection for family balancing or other social reasons.
Yet a crude appeal to public opinion is hardly sufficient. One of the guiding principles of constitutional liberal democracy is that majorities should not be able to impose their preferences on minorities, at least not unless the frowned-upon actions harm third parties or violate some important principle. In this case, the 15 per cent who favoured sex selection might well be representative of the minority of couples who have been unable to conceive children of one sex or the other, or who are otherwise unhappy with the balance of their families. Why should the luckier majority have a right to veto their efforts to realise their ambitions?
Unlike pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, sperm sorting does not involve the manipulation or destruction of embryos. Instead, before fertilisation, sperm are separated according to whether or not they are carrying the Y male chromosome. The technique, developed in the US for selecting sex in livestock, claims a 90 per cent success rate for girls and a 73 per cent success rate for boys.
The self-righteous denunciations of sex selection are a trifle hypocritical. Everyone knows that people care a lot about the sex of their offspring. In fact, the desire for children of a particular sex -- usually boys -- is a constant of human history.
In ancient Greece, men used to lie on their right side during intercourse in the hope that this would increase their chance of having sons. In 18th-century France, doctors advised men wanting male heirs to adopt the more rococo practice of tying off their left testicle while having sex. All that has changed recently is the safety and reliability of the available techniques.
The technological innovations that have done most to ease sex selection are amniocentesis and the sonogram, rather than anything arising from infertility treatment. In the developing world they have led to a gross sex imbalance because a woman can satisfy her family's desire for more boys simply by aborting female foetuses. In India and China, 117 boys are now born for every 100 girls. In some of the former Soviet republics the ratio is thought to be even more adverse.
But in wealthy nations such as the UK and US, there is no serious preponderance of boys, so critics of sex selection cannot justify their ban by citing the dangers of a sexually imbalanced population. Instead, they emphasise a philosophical point. If the new-fangled methods of sex selection were allowed, people would cease to think of their children as gifts or blessings and instead regard them as commodities to be shaped according to their wants and desires. Or, as President George W. Bush's bioethics council puts it, they would cease to understand that parenthood means being open to the "unbidden and unelected in life".
On this view, sex selection is the first step on a slippery slope leading to designer children: if and when technology permits, parents would try to select for eye colour, IQ, sexual preference and much else. One generation would then be exerting a sinister control over the next.
In general, this argument is powerful. Yet is sex selection really the same thing as designing a baby? Does it turn a child into a commodity? If Aristotle had succeeded in producing a son by lying on his right side, would he have been guilty of controlling his offspring in an illicit fashion? I hardly think so.
Parents who resort to sperm sorting would be talking nonsense if they said to their child: "We controlled a fundamental aspect of your nature because we made certain that you would be a boy." He could reply: "I'm the product of a particular sperm and egg and therefore I could not have been anything but a boy. You exerted control over sperm, not over a person. But you would also have exerted control by choosing to have intercourse on a different day, since the sperm would then have been different and I would not have been born."
By contrast, parents who pay technicians to re-engineer embryos would exert real control over their offspring. But the future child would probably still not feel controlled. If he had an artificially enhanced IQ, say, his cognitive abilities would not feel any less his than if they had arisen by chance. He might, though, feel a lack of autonomy with respect to his parents: he might feel made rather than begotten and this could be damaging. But this is a debate for the future, and possibly the distant future.
If pushed, advocates of a ban on sperm sorting resort to what they regard as a knock-down argument. Since a child of either sex is of equal value, there are simply no benefits from the procedure to weigh against the possible risks. Hence no harm is done in banning it. I agree that boys and girls are of equal value, but should the desires of parents really count for nothing? The history of efforts to influence the sex of offspring illustrates the significance of these desires. How many couples with four boys can honestly say they would not have preferred at least one girl?
The point, perhaps, is that sex selection is an issue over which individuals can legitimately differ. Some find the practice deeply distasteful, at least when it involves methods that work. Others see it as a rational way of balancing their family. In these circumstances, Mr Reid's authoritarian stance is hard to justify.
Weekend Financial Times -- 15/16 November 2003
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