The Vanishing Little Girl

In an op-ed that ran on CNN, a professor of bioethics at the University of Montreal asked, “Is gender selection of a fetus ethical?” Dr. Vardit Ravitsky discusses the new maternal blood test announced last week in the Journal of the American Medical Association—the test I mentioned that can determine a baby’s sex as early as seven weeks’ gestation. The technology has potential for good, like confirming “it’s a girl” for a mom carrying a baby she fears is carrying an abnormality passed only to boys. But even before the test is on the market, it has ignited a firestorm of ethics conversations because of its potential for evil. Think especially of countries where people want boy babies and not girl babies. A mom gets the test (or her husband/lover forces her to), discovers she's carrying a girl, and gets an abortion. We know that in China in 2005, for example, there were 32 million more men under 20 than women. That’s gender discrimination at its most chilling: Keep females from even making it into the world and you don’t have to discriminate against them once they arrive. While research in the US suggests that about as many parents want girls as boys, consider that here we more easily rationalize abortion the earlier in the pregnancy it takes place. So the test would make rationalizing abortion even easier. At the moment in the United States, any woman has the legal right to terminate a pregnancy in the first trimester without providing any reason. That’s her legal right. Dr. Vavitsky writes, “Rejecting an otherwise wanted and healthy fetus solely on the basis of its sex provides poor justification, making sex selection for non-medical reasons an ethically dubious choice even as early as seven weeks.… While promising significant benefits from a medical perspective, [the test] raises serious social and ethical concerns." I'll say!Ethicist Arthur Caplin weighed in on the conversation in an article published by MetroWest Daily News. He said, “Everything about the early testing of fetal genes for sex identification spells ethical trouble. And, as the techniques for the analysis of fetal DNA become more and more accurate and affordable, it is likely to reshape the debate over abortion…. And there are plenty of people around the world who are eager to have boys rather than girls. There are already thriving industries in old-fashioned genetic testing purely for sex selection.” He believes we will see a modest sex-selection business in the U.S. complementing what is already big business in India and China. He concludes, “Being male or female is not a disease or a disorder. Wanting a boy is a preference, but it is not one that justifies ending a pregnancy. But ending a pregnancy because you don't want a girl may be legal in the U.S., but that does not make it an ethical choice.”