An American research team has announced an artificial insemination method that can select the sex of the fetus with about 80% accuracy, British Sky News reported on the 22nd (local time). Voices of concern about the artificial selection of the sex of the fetus in the future are emerging one after another.
The study was published in the scientific journal PLOS ONE on the same day by a team led by Professor Gian Piero Palermo of Weill Cornell Medical School in New York, USA. Using the fact that sperm chromosomes have different weights depending on whether they are male (Y) or female (X), the researchers sorted sperm by gender, and artificially inseminated them with Y chromosome sperm for couples who wanted a son and with X chromosome sperm for couples who wanted a daughter. did
As a result, 59 couples who wanted daughters succeeded in obtaining daughter embryos 231 times (79.1%) out of 292 artificial insemination times. Of the 56 couples who wanted a son, 223 out of 280 artificial insemination (79.6%) gave birth to a son. In fact, 16 daughters and 13 sons were born by implanting embryos into the womb. “The technology is efficient, very safe and ethically acceptable,” said Palermo.
On the other hand, an ethical debate about the artificial selection of the sex of the fetus seems inevitable. It is illegal in many countries, including Korea, Japan, Singapore, Germany, and the United Kingdom, to select the sex of an embryo according to the parent’s preference without a valid reason, such as a gender-related disease.
Channa Jayasena, head of the Department of Andrology at Imperial College London, feared that “the technology could be applied to the selection of body characteristics such as skin color and eye color in the future.” Arthur Kaplan, a professor of medical ethics at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine, pointed out that “gender selection causes imbalance in society, and changes in population proportions will emerge as a real problem.”
Source: Donga
Mark Jones is a world traveler and journalist for News Rebeat. With a curious mind and a love of adventure, Mark brings a unique perspective to the latest global events and provides in-depth and thought-provoking coverage of the world at large.