Gender Selection Treatment is a method of choosing a gender for your child. Generally, there is a 50-50% chance that you are going to have a baby boy or a girl. The use of gender selection methods increases your chances of getting the gender of the baby you want to bear. Egg cells carry X-chromosomes, while sperm cells can carry either X-chromosomes or Y-chromosomes. If a sperm carrying an X-chromosome unites with the egg cell, the result will be a female; otherwise, if it is a Y-chromosome carrying sperm, then a baby of a male gender will be conceived.
Anti
Gender Selection Treatment has faced a lot of controversies morally and ethically on different countries. Here are the 2 main reasons why there are people who do not support it:
1. Some people say that this treatment will lead to sexual discrimination. Which sometimes lead to a question like, which is the better gender, male or female? Some parents want to have girls due to behavioral concerns. Girls, grow up to be well behaved, while boys are bit rough at times. Moral concerns about sexual discrimination would also affect the other children of the couple, who wants to have another child using gender selection.
2. Another major concern about Gender Selection Treatment is the procedures use. The most popular method of this gender selection is Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis (PGD). This method has the highest success rate of 99% of conceiving the child which has the gender that you want to have. This process involves, getting sperm samples from the father and creating embryos with the mother’s egg cells.
Once the embryo of the desired gender is developed it is then implanted into the womb of the mother. Ethical concern will enter here, with respect to life. In the Christian and Catholic world, life is formed once there is a union of the sperm and the egg cell. Since this kind of method involves creating multiple embryos, this also means that they are already considered, alive human beings.
Pro
There might be people who are not in favor with Gender Selection Treatment, but most parents have good reasons why they choose to have it. Some of these reasons are:
1. In order for them not to pass their genetic diseases that have high chances of being inherited by a particular gender. An example of such disease is hemophilia which can be passed to children of male gender. So having a girl, would prevent the parents from having their child inherit this certain disease.
2. Parents who have recently lost a child will have thoughts of making up for the loss when having a child of the same gender. Gender selection can be a way for them to once again build their family by having another child with the same gender with the one they recently lost.
3. Lost parents want to have balance in the family gender. If they already have a child of a certain gender, they would want to have another child of the opposite sex.