Mentoring Gender, Selecting Sex
By Osagie Obasogie,
Boston Globe
| 08. 08. 2005
It's a boy! It's a girl! Until the 1970s, these words welcomed virtually every child into the world. In less than one generation, however, new reproductive technologies have shifted this announcement from the delivery room to the obstetricians' office; ultrasounds and amniocenteses now allow expecting parents to choose their nursery walls' paint color months before giving birth.
The science and business of sex identification took yet another quantum leap forward this past week with the Pregnancystore.com's release of the Baby Gender Mentor Home DNA Gender Testing Kit. Now, a woman can know her child's sex shortly after she discovers her pregnancy. As soon as five weeks after conception, she can prick her finger, FedEx a blood sample to Acu-Gen Biolab in Lowell, MA, and have the sex of her sprouting embryo emailed to her faster than Netflix can send her next movie.
An unequivocal good, many say. What's more harmless than learning whether to buy dolls or trucks for the toy chest?
Ultrasounds and amniocenteses cannot accurately determine a fetus' sex until at least four months into pregnancy and sometimes...
Related Articles
By Nick Paul Taylor, BioSpace | 03.14.2024
A U.K. watchdog balked at the cost-effectiveness of Vertex Pharmaceuticals’ CRISPR-based sickle cell disease therapy Thursday, recommending against funding the treatment unless uncertainties can be cleared up satisfactorily.
The U.K. became the first country to authorize Vertex’s Casgevy (exagamglogene...
By Daniel Gilbert, The Washington Post | 03.07.2024
Vitaly Kushnir’s fertility clinic offers to screen an embryo to predict a baby’s sex, but the service can lead to ethically murky territory, like when a couple wanted it so their first child could be a boy.
But the couple...
By Manuel Ansede, El País | 03.01.2024
A team of Italian researchers has reached a major scientific milestone, heralding a revolution in the field of medicine. The scientists have succeeded in silencing a gene associated with high cholesterol levels, without the need to modify DNA. In the...
By Anne Rumberger and Marcy Darnovsky, Science for the People | 02.29.2024
Eugenics is widely regarded as a debunked pseudoscience—developed and promoted mostly in Nazi Germany—that fell off the political radar after the horrors of the Holocaust were revealed. In fact, twentieth century eugenics represented the mainstream science of its day and...