Selecting your baby’s gender may soon be a reality in light of a new sperm sorting technique. This new technique sorts sperm into a density gradient which will allow lighter sperm cells to float to the top of a container while heavier cells will sink to the bottom. Since sperm containing an X chromosome (female) are heavier and sperm containing a Y chromosome (Male) are lighter, it is now much easier to choose which sperm you want to fertilize the egg. Once implanted, the success rate is currently at about eighty percent for choosing the desired gender. This practice does have some genuine medical merit if a parent is trying to protect their child from having a disease that affects a certain gender in their family. To that end, I think this practice will create more widespread societal issues that are not being considered. This could easily lead to having a serious sex imbalance in our population and could lead to other modification techniques as the technology improves.
The idea of selecting a baby's gender by sperm sorting presents a number of moral and cultural issues that demand careful consideration. While the method could be useful medically in some situations, such as avoiding gender-specific genetic illnesses, its widespread adoption could have important and far-reaching effects which is really interesting.
ReplyDeleteThe possibility to be able to avoid sex linked diseases is nice, but it could definitely cause a sex imbalance which I agree with the comment above should demand careful consideration.
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