Sounds from the Past affecting the Future: February 2006

Sounds from the Past affecting the Future

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Sounds from the Past affecting the Future: October 2004

Sounds from the Past affecting the Future: October 2004

Who's Afraid of Gender Selection?
Canada is poised to ban proven technologies for choosing children's sex. If this is how we treat sex selection on the eve of human genetic redesign, we have a really long way to go
By George Dvorsky
Betterhumans Staff
4/28/2003 7:53 AM

Several years ago, good friends of mine were desperate to conceive a girl. To improve the odds, they tried what is known as the Shettles Method.
This method, developed by Landrum Shettles, suggests that the timing and position of intercourse can help couples determine a baby's gender.
Shettles notes that the X-bearing (female) sperm are hardier and slower moving than the Y-bearing (male) sperm. Accordingly, he proposes that couples who want a girl should have sex two or more days before ovulation. The reasoning is that when the egg finally arrives, there's an increased chance that only the female sperm will be around to fertilize it.
Additionally, because X sperm are more resilient than Y sperm, Shettles recommends that couples use the missionary position to keep sperm further away from the cervix. He also suggests that women avoid having an orgasm, as it increases the alkaline secretions that tend to favour Y sperm. (Sorry ladies.)
Couples the world-over have tried the Shettles Method and countless other techniques to exert at least some control over the sex of their offspring. And for as long as women have been making babies, they have been exchanging ideas about how to conceive a boy or a girl.
Shettles claims that his technique tips the odds of any one gender from 50% to 75%. Using the technique, my friends did in fact conceive a girl, and were absolutely delighted. Many experts dismiss the practice, however, claming that it does nothing to improve the odds.
More sophisticated technologies available at fertility clinics, such as the Albumin or MicroSort sperm separation methods, undoubtedly do. Clinical gender selection finally offers couples the chance to definitively decide the gender of their offspring without having to rely on untrustworthy techniques.
But despite the fact that they build on a long tradition and that a strong demand exists for them, gender selection technologies may be illegal if you live in a country such as Canada. Thanks to Health Minister Anne McLellan and the federal Liberal party, Canada is on the verge of seeing Bill C-13 -- the so-called "Assisted Human Reproduction Act" -- voted into law, effectively criminalizing clinical gender selection.
Yes, that's correct: Offering couples a proven means of choosing the sex of their children is soon to become a codified criminal offense in Canada, while unproven means will remain legal.
It's unbelievable. Gender selection is perhaps the most straightforward and harmless assistive reproductive procedure around. Should Bill C-13 be voted into law, it would represent a significant setback in the struggle to see germinal choice technologies receive social and political sanction.
Moreover, attempts to criminalize this and other viable reproductive options expose the irrational stubbornness and rampant ignorance that is so characteristic of biofundamentalism in both Canada and the United States. If our politicians can't get their heads around something as elementary and clear-cut as the right to choose the gender of offspring, what does it say about the potential for more significant germinal choice technologies and human re-engineering?
The ethics of gender selection
There are virtually no good arguments for opposing gender selection, making the current resistance to it all the more unfathomable.
James Grifo, president-elect of the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology and a reproductive endocrinologist, argues that "sex selection is sex discrimination," and has labeled it an unethical practice. "It's not ethical to take someone off the street and help them have a boy or a girl," says Grifo.
Like Grifo, many people are concerned that sex selection will result in possible sex ratio imbalances in the future, such as the ones that currently exist in China and India.
Others believe that gender selection imposes psychological harm to the sex-selected offspring by imposing unrealistic expectations upon them.
And yet others warn of increased marital conflict over gender selection decisions and a strengthening of gender bias in society as a whole.
"What's the next step?" asks William Schoolcraft of the Colorado Center for Reproductive Medicine in Englewood, and a supporter of Grifo. "As we learn more about genetics," asks Schoolcraft, "do we reject kids who do not have superior intelligence or who don't have the right color hair or eyes?"
Unfounded and unrealistic fears
Opponents of sex selection are essentially singing the tired old tune of slippery slopeism. They basically argue that once parents start choosing the characteristics of their offspring, discrimination against those who aren't "perfect" will soon follow.
How this catastrophic breakdown of civil rights is supposed to happen in our progressively cosmopolitan and tolerant liberal democracies is never elucidated. I simply don't buy the argument that increased reproductive options will cause society to regress back into 19th century mentalities.
As for the argument about sex ratio imbalances, I'm not particularly worried. First, most couples in the West -- those countries that tend to have tolerant people with enlightened perspectives on gender and race -- simply want sex selection for what is known as "family balancing." Many couples simply want two kids: A boy and a girl.
My grandmother produced four girls before she delivered a baby boy for my hopeful grandfather. While I love my aunts dearly, the keep-having-babies-until-you-get-the-one-you-want method seems rather excessive and unnecessary.
Also, the number of couples who choose to use clinical gender selection may turn out to be insignificant in reference to the six billion occupants of Earth. It simply won't result in any statistically significant change to the global sex ratio.
In the odd chance that sex selection does have an impact on gender ratios, the government could always step in and offer tax breaks to couples who choose to have children of the less-present gender.
And finally, the argument that premeditated characteristics cause parents to impose lofty expectations on their children is nonsense. Since time immemorial parents have imposed their own expectations upon their children. (Not to mention those stories of mothers dressing their little boys in dresses.) This would appear to be an issue of parenting skills and not reproductive rights.
Simply put, gender selection causes no harm to anyone. And in fact, it may produce the opposite effect. Take my friends who wanted a baby girl, for example; while they would have welcomed a boy with open arms, once their expectations and hopes had been established, a second boy for them would have been a mixed blessing.
Redesigning humans
Opponents of sex selection don't have a foot to stand on, and this bodes well for the advent of germinal choice technologies.
Many arguments used against sex selection are used against genetic engineering, human cloning and other pending reproductive innovations.
Yes, some people want to choose the gender of their offspring. Yes, some people are going to want to choose the physical and cognitive characteristics of their children.
And no, contrary to hysterical belief, once these procedures are perfected, they will not harm children; no, society will not breakdown as the next generation of humans become healthier, stronger, smarter and happier.
Nor will society collapse as we progressively endow parents with greater biological autonomy and reproductive control.
Stay out of our bedrooms
In 1967, Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau famously said that "there is no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation." While Trudeau was speaking about legalizing homosexuality, the spirit of his statement has been broadened by many Canadians to include not just sexual freedoms, but reproductive freedoms as well.
Unfortunately, Trudeau's Liberal party descendants have chosen to ignore his words and dismiss the brave path that he began forging over 30 years ago. Instead, Anne McLellan and the Liberals want to join Canadian couples in their bedrooms and snuggle up right between them. And this for no good reason, aside from the government's misguided patriarchal proclivities.
Here in Canada we are witnessing the Feds slip Bill C-13 by a largely unaware Canadian public. And by virtue of this ambivalence, Canadian couples are in effect opening the bedroom doors for the government to come right in.
But of course, we don't have to tolerate this. That's why elections were invented.
People of all nations should be wary of any attempt by their government to intervene and control their reproductive privileges and bodily sovereignty.
Gender selection is under attack, and citizens in democratic countries must fight back with government selection. If they restrict your reproductive rights, send them packing.

Sounds from the Past affecting the Future: October 2004

Sounds from the Past affecting the Future: October 2004

In the 70’s my interest was aroused by the French and Canadian attempts to modify or influence the gender of a child at birth by diet. They failed to note the results giving them 85 percent chance was the same as the Astrologist claim to using the male/female concept of the signs as being useful in achieving the same since it also gave them a 85 percent chance. I looked closely at it and decided that what they had overlooked was that the moon’s position in relation to the sun in the birth chart was useful in calculation of the woman’s fertility. Watching the approaching moon and realizing that she would be fertile within a said amount of hours prior and afterward, looking at the moons position relative to the sign being in a male or female sign, I then calculated the time in which it would be in the desired sign while she was fertile. This was collaborated with scientist from Alexandra. They desired a male child and the result was a male child in the sign of Gemini. I have had a female and a male child in that order to protect the boy from the demon, a female is required as first born. That was calculated to the minute. The result was more than I would have thought to achieve as the language capability of the female was as I had considered. The musical side was also beyond my ideal. She has attended Bu for 4 years, NYU for two and is due to be in Rochester for her doctorate at 23. The boy was born with the signs similar to mine and to the 1 degree of Pisces Rising and Sun in Cancer. Oh Yes! Just a thought I did emphasize that the woman change her diet accordingly to bring her to a alkaline or acid environment within the vagina so that the sperm would be able to travel accordingly…etc., the two methods were documented in the mid 70’s and entered in the medical journals, regardless of what other writers have written in books claiming the acid/alkaline value was the key, it was only half the key! The remaining untold portion of the key was in the hands of the astrologist. Neither was able to put it together as I did!!! Oh! One more thing, inorder to circumvent the diet requirement, the medical publications mentioned the use of baking soda or vinegar in a douche to change the woman's vaginal environment to accept or assist the selection by making it a acidic or alkaline environement without the diet change. And these were noted in medical journals as I had requested the scientist to do so without giving credit to anyone in particular as the French and Canadian Scientist plus the Astrologist had already come up with the basic ideal, I only put it together. Sorry no book was written at that time, although, some woman doctor did recently write a book and claim the acidic/alkaline information as her discovery and established test..., but that would only give her the 85 percent probability, the other 85 percent bringing up the accuracy would be the Astrologist analysis and that would give 95 percent probability. (click on the upper left hand side on Astrology if your personally interested in GENDER SELECTION)—Michael Ramirez