Rich Foreigners Come to the U.S. to Select Their Baby’s Sex

Bioethics   |   Rebecca Taylor   |   Aug 28, 2012   |   2:44PM   |   Washington, DC

They have to come here because sex selection using IVF and preimplantation genetic diagnosis is illegal where they live. It needs to be illegal in America as well. Here is why.

The Telegraph reports:

They are spending up to £30,000 a time on trips to New York, to guarantee a boy or a girl, according to a clinic.

Clients include senior British politicians, claims Dr Jeffrey Steinberg, the Cambridge-trained IVF specialist who heads the Fertility Institutes clinic in Manhattan….

However, sex selection for social or ‘family balancing’ reasons was made illegal in the UK in October 2009, after the government amended the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990.

Under the legislation, sex selection is only allowed for medical reasons, such as to avoid the risk of a child being born with a sex-linked genetic disorder like Duchenne muscular dystrophy, which only presents in boys. Similar laws exist in many other countries.

No such stipulations exist in many US states, with IVF clinics there seeking to capitalise on a growing desire among wealthy couples from around the world to design their families rather than leaving it to chance. Speaking to the Evening Standard, Dr Steinberg, who trained alongside IVF pioneer Robert Edwards at the Bourne Hall Clinic, which is linked to Cambridge University, said 15 per cent of clients at the New York centre were British….

[Steinberg] admitted clients from some countries were almost exclusively interested in boys. Demand from China – currently under pressure to revoke its controversial one child policy – was 98 per cent for boys, he said, while from India it was 97 per cent.

CLICK LIKE IF YOU’RE PRO-LIFE!

 

So Dr. Steinberg is tossing out girl embryos in favor of boys for his Asian clients 97% of the time. There is a war on women in the United States, it is just not the war that people think it is.