Med School Ethics Board Okays Embryo Gender Selection Study
by Mary Rettig
November 9, 2005
(AgapePress) - - An embryo donation advocate says Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, is treading on dangerous ethical ground with a new clinical trial it is starting. A fertility clinic at BCM -- which is not affiliated with Baylor University -- has been given the go-ahead by the college's ethics committee to conduct a study into the effects of allowing couples to select the gender of their babies. Dr. Jeffrey Keenan of the National Embryo Donation Center says Baylor College of Medicine is using a technique called pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, or PGD. "They are actually going through in vitro fertilization, creating embryos and then testing these very tiny human beings for the desired sex," he explains, "and then using those embryos of the desired sex to implant into the uterus of the mother."
This process brings up highly controversial issues, Keenan points out, including the question of what happens in the event of one gender potentially becoming preferable to another among parents. "And it's very likely that they will discard embryos of the, if you will, 'wrong' sex," he adds. Generally, he says, the unused embryos would not be donated to infertile couples but would simply be destroyed.
The National Embryo Donation Center spokesman contends that even experts in this technology have problems with Baylor's use of it.
"I was recently at a meeting where some of the top pre-implantation genetic diagnosis people in the country attended," he notes, "and they unanimously said that they felt that PGD, which is the technique that Baylor is using for sex selection, is unethical and is trivializing this technology."
Questions remain as to whether PGD should even be used at all, Keenan asserts. He says it is a disappointing step Baylor College of Medicine is taking to use PGD for "family balancing" when the procedure is banned in many countries, including Britain.
Mary Rettig, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.
