Aggregated News
A Washington-based reproductive clinic is advertising gender selection services in a Canadian newspaper that targets South Asian communities, CBC News has learned.
Using reproduction medicine to select the gender of a child was made illegal in Canada in 2004.
In its ad, the Washington Centre for Reproductive Medicine, based in Bellevue, offers to help Indo-Canadian families "Create the Family You Want: Boy or Girl." It accomplishes that by telling the parents the gender of an embryo before it is selected for transfer.
"The way I feel about this is that all the American companies that are using these ads do it for their own greed and business enhancement," says Charan Gill, founding president of the Progressive Intercultural Community Services Society in Surrey, B.C. "They know the Indo-Canadian community wants more boys.
"Simply, it's an issue of sex selection to which we are totally opposed. We think it is disgusting," says Gill.
This news comes after research was published Monday in the Canadian Medical Association Journal showing significantly higher male-to-female ratios in third-born children to Indian born mothers in Ontario.
Canada's...