Bred in the USA - however foreign parents choose! High-tech disease prevention = fly-buy criminal selection I hate being ahead of the pack on a sickening trend. But inevitably I am, and to my dismay, time has proven me right once again. In recent weeks, I've written about the lamentable practice of of unborn children via the selective abortion of unborn fetuses. In some Asian areas - like certain provinces in India - the practice has skewed the sex ratio severely, as I reported to you on 4/25/2006 (see update below). And unfortunately, I predicted long ago (more than two years ago, to be exact) that precisely such a thing would soon happen - not using abortion, but using genetic pre-selection. Some argue that it's inevitable, now that we have the technology to screen un-implanted embryos for disease, that we would start screening them for gender as well - or even to select a baby's individual traits... Of course, it's now happening with great regularity in at least one place on the planet, according to a recent Associated Press article. And wouldn't you know it, that place isn't in male-centric Asia or some godless Third World African nation where life is cheap. No - it's happening in supposedly one of the most puritanical countries on Earth: America. The eye-opening AP piece reveals that for all of our moralizing and heated debates over abortion, sexuality, and parenting, there are NO REGULATIONS in place regarding the selection of a baby's gender in the good ol' U.S. of A. And it's a lucrative business for the clinics that offer it - as much as $20,000 per implanted embryo, the article's sources say. Not surprisingly, the practice attracts a large international clientele from nations where it's illegal to select a baby's sex via abortion or other means, places like China, India, Indonesia - even Australia and Canada... And it's no wonder the procedure is so popular with the foreigners: The only place it's advertised is in airline magazines and on international websites! According to a source from one Los Angeles clinic, it's not uncommon to perform the implantation of gender-selected embryos in as many as eight international women per week. Far from an involved medical process, the selection procedure takes only a five-day stay in the U.S. after some home-based injections to stimulate the woman's egg production. (These are typically perfectly legal in most countries.) Once that happens, they jump a flight to the U.S., the eggs are extracted and fertilized, then sex-sorted and re-implanted, resulting in pregnancy. For all their home governments know, the parents sought the aid of a U.S. fertility doctor, made some lucky whoopee during a vacation to the Land of the Free, and voila - nine months later they just happened to get that boy they always wanted back in China. Of course, the L.A. clinic cited in the AP article maintains that as many people want girls as boys (they say that for every Asian couple desiring a boy, there's a Canadian couple that yearns for a girl), but how could this be verified without breaching doctor/patient confidentiality? So welcome to the future, where the world is still roughly half of each sex - but where most of the men are Chinese or Indian, and the bulk of the women are Canadian... Yeah, that sounds natural.
Update to Daily Dose, 4/25/2006
Back in April, I reported to you on the first penalty ever handed down in India (a doctor and his assistant jailed for 2 years) for sex selection via abortion. Technically, this practice has been illegal there since 1996, but it has been so rampant for so long that the sex ratio is estimated to be as low as 1 female for every 2 males in some Indian Provinces... This is even lower than the figure I'd reported (4 females for every 5 males). Well, apparently the Indian government has gotten the message that if they don't crack down on the practice, they could soon have no one left to further their race - the country could end up 100% male if modern Indian parents have their way! According to a recent Reuters article, 11 of the Indian government's own doctors have been suspended for female feticide (killing unborn female fetuses) - and another 30 private doctors have been brought up on similar charges. The AP piece cites a recent study by Indian and Canadian researchers, which suggests that as many as half a million fetuses are aborted every year in India simply because they're female. If this figure is representative of other male-dominated Asian nations, that means the Eastern Hemisphere is in the midst of a modern-day holocaust against women that could number in the tens of millions of victims. Sobering to think this could actually happen, isn't it? But it just goes to show how apt humankind is to abuse the technology we create... Never selective about the truth I report, William Campbell Douglass II, MD | 
