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...
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Louise Perry’s recent article in The Spectator cautions against “The quiet return of eugenics,” a threat she locates in preimplantation genetic testing for polygenic disorders. The technology is billed as a way for parents undergoing IVF to select which embryo to implant based on information about each embryo’s genetic risk factors and traits. These reports, she says, give parents “a very full picture of the adult that embryo could become”––from their child’s risk of developing different diseases to their “likely...
Photo by TeggorMindFish via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under
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Prophets of techno-paradise tend to bloom and then fade but not necessarily disappear. Malcolm and Simone Collins, a husband and wife team, have been on quite a roll for a couple of years. However, their time in the spotlight may at last be coming to a close, after a report revealed their parenting style.
The Collins family have already featured on this...
GATTACA was released in 1997, but — remarkably — is even more relevant now than it was then, as the technologies whose social implications it explores have developed considerably.
On Thursday, June 13, the California Film Institute presented GATTACA to a sold-out house at the Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center as part of their Science on Screen series. CGS Associate Director Katie Hasson offered framing for the film and participated in a Q+A discussion.
The film’s plot explicitly involves...