Science and Technology Committee

Children today have fewer guarantees about the gender of their parents, under new adoption and IVF treatment practices. Why then, should parents be entitled to select the gender of their children?

Should they be allowed to discard embryos of the undesired sex simply "for family balancing reasons", as suggested above? If the sex of their child is such an overriding issue to a couple, I think something else may be unbalanced here…

I do not think it is appropriate for the HFEA to endorse sexism by granting any licence for the express purpose of selecting against a particular sex.

If the HFEA has any credibility at all as a watchdog, it has to stick with its recent policy statement and the outcome of the public consultation, in which the public made it clear that they oppose this procedure, otherwise what was the point of their consultation?

The HFEA need to ensure that there are penalties for clinics engaging in any part of this practice. If the only way to stop this happening is to outlaw the exportation of embryos, or severely tightening up exportation, then so be it. The HFE Act was supposed to assist women to have children and always treat the child as of paramount importance. PGD followed by the destruction of the embryo on gender grounds is in direct contradiction of the HFEA's mandate. Furthermore, the HFEA should have no part in fostering irrational and damaging parental prejudices about one sex being superior to the other.

I find it somewhat odd that we have not learnt the lessons from countries such as China and India. Sex selection for non-medical reasons has profound sociological as well as individual-psychological implications.

Whilst both China's and India's society has certain features which may increase the negative implications of sex selection (e.g. paying a dowry) there are similar features in British society. Girls are most definitely more desirable, particularly considering their success in primary, secondary and now higher education.

There's no reason to believe, therefore, that we can succeed where China and India failed. Seems to be a case of anglo-arrogance.

Even if sex selection was carried out on a case-by-case basis, there's little doubt that its acceptability would increase. Moreover there are important consequences for the child. For instance, what happens if a boy is produced instead of a girl? Considering the high-failure rate this is possible.

The example concerned should not be permitted on the basis of more general arguments about sex selection.

The HFEA must demonstrate that it means what it says. Every effort should be made to ban sex selection for social reasons.

In the scenario being discussed, all the HFEA appears to have to do is refuse to grant a licence to extract the cells to the UK clinic.

The HFEA can say no sometimes.

I agree with the other comments. Why should we allow sexism to determine who gets born? Sexism is not just viewing women as inferior: it is the the use of rigid gender stereotypes. Those parents who are desperate for a girl will be acting on such sterotypes. As the mother of one of the first MicroSort babies put it in a fairly typical comment, "I wanted to have someone to play Barbies with and to go shopping with; I wanted the little girl with long hair and pink and doing fingernails" (Choosing Your Baby's Gender," cbsnews.com, November 7, 2002; posted in the "News Articles" section of the MicroSort website, http://www.microsort.com).

In this scenario, I would expect the HFEA to say no. The more difficult case we need to deal with, however, is that of couples going to Spain or the US to start PGD from scratch. We need to find a general way to stop or at least inhibit 'reproductive tourism'. I think there are some precedents for this in legislation on sexual tourism?

David King

This should not be permitted. There has been a recent public consultation on this issue in the UK and people strongly came down against sex selection for non medical reasons. So both the public and the HFEAct are agreed on this, and for good reason. The HFEA should, where possible, not allow the bypassing of the law in this country through this kind of medical tourism.

This scenario, and sex selection in general, encourage a completely consumerist attitude towards children. The message here is ‘order what you want’ rather than ‘accept what you are given’, i.e. the children are being treated just like possessions than people. Parental love should (ideally) be unconditional, not influenced by physical capacity (gender). Children should not be treated as products to just order and design.

There are other considerations too – not just affecting the child born but any siblings, the wider family and potentially their peer group too. What emotional and psychological pressures will be felt by the child born after sex selection who is the ‘right’ sex? What if the selection is not ‘successful?’ What welcome will be given to the child who is the ‘wrong’ sex? How will siblings feel if they feel they are the ‘wrong’ sex?

Any activities (including PGD and sex selection) that do not take into account ‘the welfare of the child who may be born’ (HFEAct) would be outside the law. This is an essential part of the HFEAct and should be adhered to.

It is totally absurd as part of a free society to go down to the road of allowing parents to select the gender of their children. Firstly, the natural process of gender selection should not be tampered with; it has succeeded quite happily up until now and will continue to do so. More concerning is the attitude of selecting gender as one would the next change of car or the next move of house. There is no such thing as a balanced family, especially in an psychological understanding of talents and strengths and weaknesses. Gender selection is one further manifestation of a complete lack of value in the natural process. It would appear that we have become bored with nature and so seek to play with it. This is quite wrong, and as such the legalisation of gender selection should be opposed by all decent standing MPs. The whole process is also morally wrong as it depends upon embryonic research. The dignity of a human being should be respected from fertilisation to natural death, and as such, any form embryonic research is fundamentally wrong on a moral level.

I can appreciate a person's desire to have a child of one particular sex. I think it is especially difficult for those who are only ever going to have one child. I also feel sad for the children who are born into families whose parents continue to have children until one of the desired sex is born.

Parents should consider that while they may have a preference for a particular gender for their child, it should not be of such paramount importance. Ideally parents would not have a preference.

But why bring more children into a family for the purpose of only trying to see if they can bear a child of one particular sex - I feel that this is unfair on those children and the family as a whole.

If the HFEA was to legislate such an option to become available - I think careful monitoring should be made to ensure that the numbers of males and females born should mirror that in nature.

‘Family balancing’ is an unjustifiable reason and purpose. My arguments relating to Scenarios 1 and 2 apply here also. The situation here is the preference of one sex over the other, a designer baby ordered. It is a back door to eugenics.

The HFEA has already banned sex selection, for good reasons, and should not permit people to deliberately bypass our own regulations through this kind of ‘tourism’. No amount of regulations can prevent abuses. This is especially since it is so difficult to define and anticipate for the future all the eventualities which the regulators want to prevent.