Gender Selection

What a terrible situation.

Nearly twice as many boy babies are conceived as girls, but they are much more likely to miscarry, and by birth, the ratio is roughly 105 boys to 100 girls. Weird, isn't it. Girls seem to be stronger in the womb than boys, and years ago I remember reading that actually there were 105 girls to every 100 boys being born.

Oh wow, just found this article - very scary.

www.economist.com/node/15636231

Not everybody prefers one sex over the other (although it is more common for boys to be more popular). I've heard of parents who have three or four boys who would like to be sure that the next baby is a girl, or vice versa. Personally, I was just thankful to have two healthy babies.

PGD for Gender Selection also referred to as PGS or Preimplantation Gender Selection is a technique that enables couples with a particular inherited condition in their family to avoid passing it on to their children. It is also used with the purpose of gender selection for couples who have had more children of the same sex to want to have a family balance and choose the gender of the baby.

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Had a work colleague whose first baby, a boy, died at birth due to a genetic problem. Subsequently they underwent genetic investigation and counselling and discovered it was likely to happen with each male child and also may not have happened with different partners. She went on to have 2 lovely daughters..do not know if as a result of 'engineered' pregnancies or luck!

Mishap do you fancy renaming yourself Mischief?

Thanks jess

This discussion brought on the muse!....

The Choice

The doctor stands with the syringe in his hand
And I lie with my legs up, all coy
He shakes up the test tube and ask with a smile
What do you fancy, a girl or a boy?

johanna - it depends on the genes
Some genes are dominant. If it is a gene that causes a medical condition, every child bearing it will get the condition. Some genes are recessive, in which case a child could be a carrier, and pass it on to another generation but they won't get the condition themselves.
But it gets more complicated when the gene is on the x chromosome, as in haemophilia.
If you are a girl and bear one haemophilia gene on an x, you will have another healthy x, the gene is recessive, not dominant, so the healthy gene wins out and you will not have haemophilia. But could carry it.
If you are a boy and have one haemophilia gene on an x, you only have a teeny Y chromosome to go with it. This does not have a gene at all of this type. So the X carried gene will cause haemophilia. Queen Victoria had this gene and passed it on to many european royals.
So prenatal screening in this case of a known haemophilia carrying female, would be to ensure no boy born.
But any girl born might in turn pass it on.
I hope this makes sense.
This kind of screening is normally only done in serious conditions like this.

I googled 'gender selection for medical reasons'. There are some American sites which make no secret of the fact that they offer selection on non-medical grounds, what they call 'family balancing'. If anyone is interested in knowing more about the techniques used, there is plenty of information.

I think( but not sure) you can pick up the aberrerant gene on screening and therefore only implant noncarrier embryos .

Dorset - we seem to have watched the same programme.
I believe a GP is under investigation in England for offering a termination on the grounds of the foetus being the 'wrong' sex, i.e. a girl.

China is now suffering with their one-child only policy. As it is customary for the oldest son to care for his parents, it being naturally assumed the daughters will marry and look after her aged in-laws. If a couple had a baby girl the child would be deserted and end up in an orphange or dead. With scans being able to tell the sex of the child, female foetuses are aborted. So now we have the situation that there are young men in China who cannot find a wife. In some rural and remote areas girls are kidnapped . This might happen in India as any so called 'clinic'will scan a preganant woman for a fee and abort a baby girl for a futher fee. So an excellent reason not to have gender selection. Incidentally you can tell the sex of the baby at 20 weeks - not to late for an abortion in lots of countries.

jess
Would you be so kind to answer the following for me/us.

What are the implications when one chooses gender selection on medical grounds? As in serious genetical conditions.

Would it mean for instance, when having chosen a girl, that this very girl would , when her time comes to have a child also have to go through the gender selection process?
Although she may not be a sufferer of whatever condition, she could still be the carrier?

They would oppose gender selection on medical grounds because the normal route for this to happen is screening the embryo and then having an abortion. Some people are against abortion under all circumstances, even if the mothers life is in danger. It is to them an absolute wrong thing and can never be justified. So they say anyway. (One always wonders - if it was their own pregnant daughters life, would they be so adamant)
Having an abortion in the UK because you just want a child of another gender is not legal in Britain.

I'm not sure of the state of play re pre-implantation gender selection.
You would have to either
1. separate x sperms from y sperms and then use A.I.
2. go the IVF route with drugs for mother, harvest embryos and then determine their gender in vitro. Technically possible I think but an expensive and elaborate process.

2. would also fall foul of the anti abortion fundamentalist lobby because the other embryos would be discarded.
Suspect mumsnet poster not thought it through. They are used to such a lot of choice in shops, bless them.

agree with whenim64 my elder daughter also had to have the help of IVF .unfortunatly it didn't work.

Picking and choosing the sex of a child? hmm not really thought about that one.

Not just sexual frustration - I saw a documentary about China and it said that in some rural areas the inbalance was so great that some women were being forced to be 'married' to two brothers and there were fears of Sabine-style kidnaps. The fact that it is girls who are aborted or left to die is just another proof of the low value put upon daughters.

Has the gender selection that has gone on in China recently– seems there aren't enough women to go round because one child families preferred to have a boy more often than not – helped to slow down the rise in population? If so, that could be seen as a good thing, though problems of sexual frustration might increase

I am puzzled as to why anybody would object to gender selection on medical grounds. If you knew you had a very serious genetically transferred condition, which was linked to a specific sex gene, (usually male) why would you not want to make sure you had a child who was free of it?

I'm all for it!

'Why do people have IVF?' In the case of both my daughters, because conventional fertilisation wasn't working so they needed some medical assistance. In both cases it worked first time and they both had twins. We count ourselves a very lucky family. If IVF hadn't worked, they would have tried the adoption route.

No worry Jo!
I know what you meant! It's English language! Gender choice or selection! Very difficult!

jo4
Please don't single me out. Petallus also thought she might have the wrong end of the stick.

Maybe we both meant the wrong end of the STIG?

PML now.