Baby Gender Mentor: Parents May Welcome Baby Gender Test, But Bioethicists Worry
Another article about concerns that the Baby Gender Mentor test, which
claims to be able to determine an unborn baby's gender at just 5 weeks
gestation using just a drop of the mother's blood, will be used as the
basis for sex selective abortion. Tidbits from the article:
- 2,000 Baby Gender Mentor kits were sold since the test was featured on NBC's The Today Show (that's a three week span).
-
Surveys of Americans show no general gender preference
- Baby Gender Mentor is available only in the United States.
- The chairman of the department of medical ethics at the
University of Pennsylvania, Arthur Caplan, doubts the new test would be
used widely in the United States. I doubt he knows very many pregnant women.
- Caplan also "questioned the lack of counseling for those who want
to find out the baby's gender". Hello? Where is the
counseling for women who are devastated every day at an ultrasound when
they find out their baby is not the gender they hoped for?
- C. N. Wang, Acu-Gen's scientific director, said the company is
"not ready to publish data on the technique and its accuracy".
That's really interesting, because every media outlet is willing to
quote Acu-Gen's claim of accuracy without verifying it with any actual
data!