Gender Selection News : MicroSort

World's first MicroSort baby celebrates 10th birthday

Maureen — Sun, 13 Aug 2006 13:00:00 GMT

Happy birthday to Jessica Collins! The first MicroSort baby, who was conceived after XSort and IUI, turns 10 today. It reminds those of us who have used MicroSort, and those who are contemplating it, what a new technology this really is.

MicroSort hikes prices

Maureen — Mon, 20 Mar 2006 04:47:00 GMT

If you're hoping to use MicroSort to conceive a son or a daughter, get ready for the sticker shock to get even worse. There's just been a significant price increase in the sperm sorting service.

Notes:

Service	March 2005	March 2006	Increase
MicroSort Sperm Sorting	$2,995	$3,400	$405
Extra sorted vial	$651	$700	$49
Patient Consultation (GIVF)	$265	$300	$35
Patient Consultation (Collaborator)	$133	$300	$167
IUI Procedure (1)	$329	$365	$36
Daily Monitoring for IUI (2)	$392/day	$475/day	$83/day
Full Monitoring for IUI (3)	$1,169	$1,650	$481
Review Outside Monitoring for IUI (4)	$496	$625	$128

Fee for IUI procedure only, does not include sort or ovulation monitoring.
If you choose to detect ovulation yourself using at-home ovulation prediction kits (OPKs), you can pay this fee for one day of testing to confirm ovulation.
Fee for complete ovulation monitoring at GIVF
Fee for GIVF to review the results of ovulation monitoring tests, and coordinate your cycle, with an outside doctor. You must still pay your doctor for the tests.

Run for the hills, the designer babies are coming!

Maureen — Wed, 24 Aug 2005 12:00:00 GMT

Britian is only a "hop, skip, and a jump" away from the nightmare vision of social engineering portrayed in Aldous Huxley's science fiction classic "Brave New World", according to the chairman of the British Medical Association Welsh Council.

As the UK government considers whether to lift the ban on gender selection for family balancing, Dr. Tony Calland warns that allowing parents to use sex selection on non-medical grounds puts us on the dreaded "slippery slope" toward Huxley's science fiction dystopia, where the inhabitants are standardized, laboratory-grown clones, pre-programmed to be members of the upper class or desgined to be worker drones.

"There are a lot of people who will see any loosening of this Act as a further step on the slippery slope - the end point being where you decide that you want a blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl who is bright and good at tennis. That takes us down a road which, to my mind, is Brave New World territory. ... We are now a hop, skip and a jump away from it and that makes me very uncomfortable."

Although I'm quite a science fiction fan myself, just for the heck of it let's check out the science facts.

Scientists do not know which gene combinations are responsible for complex traits like intelligence, athletic ability, leadership, beauty, and so on.
Scientists cannot alter an embryo's genetic makeup to produce a desired trait, such as eye color, or even to correct a defect, such as having a disease gene. So far, this has been accomplished only in laboratory animals, and not entirely successfully. Many attempts at genetic modifications introduce unwanted mutations with extreme developmental consequences, even death. We are not a "hop, skip, and a jump" away from using this on humans experimentally, much less on a widespread basis.
Parents cannot design a baby with many desired traits by genetic screening. Although you have seen dozens of news stories about so-called "designer babies" like Jamie Whitaker, the term design is actually incorrect. It's only used because the media knows it's an attention-grabber.

In fact, scientists can merely select an embryo which already has a desired trait. The embryo is still the natural, unaltered offspring of the parents. Genetic screening can do no more than simply identify whether an embryo has a desired trait or not.

So what would stop parents from writing a laundry list of desirable traits for their baby, and selecting only embryos that match?

Parents are limited simply by the number of their embryos available to choose from. As anyone who has been through IVF knows, during each IVF attempt, only a very limited number of viable, healthy embryos can be produced. It just isn't feasible to screen for several "designer" characteristics. Dr. Robert Jansen explains it very well:

First, no gene (unless both parents have it) is going to appear in more than, on average, half the embryos.

Second, how the different genes (all 32,000 or more of them) assort with each other is totally out of our hands, even in an IVF lab. In a restricted number of embryos, as is always the case after egg retrieval and IVF, probably much less than half will even be normal (in terms of having the normal number of chromosomes); of these, on average no more than half will have one wanted gene, no more than a quarter will have two wanted ones, an eighth will have three ... and so on. If you want to get too picky, you quickly run out of embryos.

As for the "slippery slope" -- although gender selection using MicroSort and PGD has been available in the US for a number of years (I used MicroSort 5 years ago), I certainly haven't noticed any tendency for Americans to give up procreating the good old fashioned way.

(Note to Dr. Calland: War of the Worlds isn't real, either; please do not be alarmed.)

Designer babies 'close to reality'
Wales News
"Designer Babies?" Hardly. The near future: a slope that's not as slippery as it looks
Dr. Robert Jansen, from the book Getting Pregnant
Human Germline Genetic Modification <-- Science Fact
Genetics & Public Policy Center (Johns Hopkins University)
Brave New World <-- Science Fiction
by Aldous Huxley (Read the entire book online)

Pregnant woman killed for having only daughters

Maureen — Tue, 23 Aug 2005 16:11:00 GMT

This post is so difficult to write, but I felt I could not let this story pass without mentioning the tragic fate of Nita Koli, a 25-year-old mother in Gujarat, India. Six months pregnant, the young woman was burned to death by her husband and mother-in-law, apparently after learning her baby was a third daughter.

The most appalling aspect of this story is that Nita is far from unique in her sad fate -- each year in India, thousands of women are burned in a crime called bride burning. The practice is carried out by men who find their wife unsatisfactory for some reason, usually dowry-related. Even though the dowry custom has been outlawed in India, a bride's parents are expected to provide the couple with expensive gifts and money, sometimes throughout the marriage. If the husband is dissatisfied with the dowry, or if the parents fall behind in payments, the wife may become a victim of bride burning; often disguised as an accident or (incredibly) suicide. The husband, conveniently enough, is now eligible for a new wife and another dowry.

In Nita Koli's case, it seems clear that husband Sanjay was displeased with the economics of receiving one dowry for Nita, yet facing the demands for three dowries from future in-laws. Whether he and his mother, Kuwar Koli, will be punished for this barbaric crime remains to be seen. On the date of Nita's burning, August 10, a "complaint of harassment was lodged with the Morbi police". The two were not even arrested until Nita died from her burns a week later, when they were charged with murder.

In the current debate in the UK over whether the ban on sex selection should be lifted, there are some who argue that permitting gender selection for non-medical reason sends the wrong message to countries with a strong preference for boys. The gender ratio in India, in particular, has become distorted from the use of sex selective abortion, infanticide, neglect, and abandonment. (I don't personally consider these practices to be "sex selection", any more than I would consider abortion to be "birth control".) The Indian government is actually promoting a "Save the Girl Child" campaign, imploring parents not to abort female babies or murder their newborn daughters. The very idea that a government finds it necessary to beg parents not to kill their own children, is mind boggling to the point of incomprehension.

To those working to improve the plight of women in India, outrage over a procedure like MicroSort cannot be overstated, because it is viewed as inherently sexist -- that choosing a baby's sex implies favoring one sex over the other. However, being steeped in a culture that favors males so strongly that women become viewed as little more than incubators for more males, they have missed a crucial point: The majority of those seeking to use sex selection in Western countries want to have girls. ]

Every statistic available for sex selection bears out a desire for girls. More girls are requested at MicroSort in the US and at Ericsson clinics worldwide. British couples undergoing infertility treatment were polled about gender selection, and many more said they would choose to have a girl, if the choice were available. Even sales the at-home Gen-Select gender selection kit are reported to be higher for the female kit.

The message from the responsible use of sex selection for family balancing isn't that one sex is superior, but that both are equally desired and treasured. And that daughters aren't merely a burden to be tolerated, but are beloved and cherished; and desired so strongly that mothers are willing to surmount enormous obstacles for the joy of having them.

Please pray with me for the welfare the two daughters left behind by Nita Koli, whose circumstances, I can only imagine, must be very grim indeed.

Pregnant woman burnt to death
The Times of India
In-laws kill pregnant woman for not having sons
Blogging Baby
India still fighting to 'save the girl child'
International Herald Tribune, APR-2005
Are our sisters and daughters for sale? When will the horrors of dowry and bride-burning end?
India Together,

MicroSort profile: the Dawe family of Memphis, TN

Maureen — Tue, 23 Aug 2005 11:59:00 GMT

After three daughters in a row, Jon and Kacie Dawe hoped that MicroSort could increase their chances of having a boy.

Their first MicroSort attempt, however, proved to be unsuccessful. Jon flew to Fairfax, Virginia, to provide a sperm sample, which was sorted using the MicroSort procedure to increase the percentage of Y-sperm. The sample was frozen, then shipped home where it was used to artificially inseminate Kacie, who did not become pregnant.

"... it would be nice to have a boy. If it ends up being a girl, it is a girl," Kacie said in July 2004 before the couple tried MicroSort for the second time. "I don't think I would have done anything that required me to choose between embryos. When you go through all this you realize how precious life is."

For their second attempt, the couple travelled to MicroSort for IVF, combining their quest for a son with a family vacation in Washington, DC. Three embryos were implanted, and Kacie and Jon surely rejoiced to learn that she was pregnant. At 16 weeks pregnancy, an ultrasound showed that Kacie was carrying twins, a boy and a girl.

Kacie recalled thinking as the ultrasound got under way, "Please, please, please let there be a boy in there."

Joseph Maxwell and Sophie Rose were born on April 27, weighing 7 pounds, 10 ounces and 6 pounds, 7 ounces.

Their family of 7 children now includes Hannah, 10, and Grant, 9, from Kacie's previous marriage; Gabrielle, 5, and twin girls, Jacqueline and Jordan, 3; and now little twins Max and Sophia.

This is the first case of boy/girl MicroSort twins I've come across, besides my own. (Like Kacie, I also didn't find out I was having twins until well into pregnancy -- 20 weeks, in fact!) Perhaps they wonder, like me, whether having boy/girl twins was just a statistical chance, or whether there was such a strong predisposition to having one gender, overwhelming odds were needed to overcome it to have just one baby of the opposite gender. We'll never know. ;-)

Happy 4-month-birthday to twins Sophia and Max, and best wishes to all of the Dawe family!

Couple credit experimental technique with producing boy in girl-dominated family
The Commercial Appeal, Memphis
(Free registration required)

Boy or girl: Can you choose?

Maureen — Tue, 02 Aug 2005 21:21:00 GMT

This American Baby magazine feature article is "a roundup of what you can try at home -- and what's involved in going the high tech route". The article includes a few quotes from me (Maureen) and a mention of this Web site.

Boy or girl: Can you choose?
American Baby Magazine

American Baby: Gender Selection: Three Moms' Stories

Maureen — Mon, 25 Jul 2005 11:21:00 GMT

Gender Selection: Three Moms' Stories
American Baby Magazine

A short excerpt from a fairly lengthy article in last month's American Baby magazine, summarizing the gender selection experiences of three mothers who tried Shettles, MicroSort, and PGD. The third mother profiled, Jennifer Merrill Thompson, wrote a book about her experience and her research into gender selection methods called Chasing the Gender Dream. (I recommend the book!)

The original article included a couple of quotes from yours truly, but I guess I didn't make the Web cut. [:P]

Gender Selection More Possible, But Controversial

Maureen — Tue, 26 Apr 2005 03:00:00 GMT

Gender Selection More Possible, But Controversial
ABC News

Lengthy article covers MicroSort and PGD and compares medical gender selection to home kits like GenSelect.

It's a Boy! We made sure of it.

Maureen — Fri, 26 Nov 2004 02:57:00 GMT

It's a Boy! We made sure of it.East Bay Express

Explores the "ethical can of worms" posed by MicroSort and family balancing: the slippery slope, the nation of little sisters, and gender imbalance in Asia. The author forsees 5% of the population using MicroSort -- that's 14 million babies each year, compared to the 419 born over 8 years so far. I'm sure MicroSort stockholders are thrilled.

Indianapolis couple use MicroSort and have twin girls

Maureen — Tue, 16 Nov 2004 02:40:00 GMT

Designer Babies
Indianapolis WISH-TV

The Otts of Indianpolis have 4-year-old twin girls, after using MicroSort with a local collaborator.