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Gender Selection
Concerns Ethicists
DEBRA NUSSBAUM COHEN
Special to The Jewish News
T
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s
Nutrition is our business
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11/20
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ish Eldet c°
he recent announcement
that selecting a baby's gen-
der is now feasible has
naturally prompted two
questions for manyJews:
Is sex selection Jewishly accept-
able? And if it is, what does that say
about God's role in human creation?
Jewish ethicists
and rabbis expressed
concern
after a Vir-
,
gin ia company
clAimed to perfect a
method for sorting
sperm that allows
couples to select the
sex of their child.
Rabbi Moshe
Tendler, a widely
respected Orthodox
expert in bioethics
and Judaism, said the
motivation for inter-
vening in human
creation is what
makes it Jewishly
acceptable or not.
Sorting sperm to
try to avert a possi-
ble disease in the
fetus would be
acceptable, but
choosing the child's
gender would not be,
said Tendler, the
chairman of the biol-
ogy department at Yeshiva Universi-
ty in New York.
Dawn Robinson Rose, the direc-
tor of the Center for Jewish Ethics
at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical
College, agreed.
"God is in the process when
intervention leads to the prevention
of disease, such as Tay-Sachs," she
said.
"But this sort of intervention
could be an area which leads to
extreme abuse, given the preference
for males over females, which is a
part of so many cultures and has
been a part of the Jewish communi-
ty," she said.
The new technique that allows
couples to successfully choose a
baby's gender was developed at the
Genetics and IVF Institute in Vir-
ginia. Researchers were able to select
sperm carrying either the X chromo-
some or Y chromosome based on
the amount of DNA, or genetic
Debra Nussbuam Cohen writes for
the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
material, that it carried.
The researchers said that Y chro-
mosome-bearing sperm have nearly
3 percent less genetic material than
X-carrying sperm.
Men are solely responsible for
determining the gender of the chil-
dren they help to create: a single
sperm carries either an X chromo-
some or a Y chromosome. If it is a-
X, the child will be a girl, while if it
is a Y, then it will produce a boy.
Researchers using the new tech-
nique reported in the medical jour-
nal Human Reproduction a 65 per-
cent success rate in filtering out Y
chromosome-bearing sperm and an
85 percent success rate in doing the
same for X chromosome-bearing
sperm.
Thirteen out of 14 couples who
had requested a daughter had given ,
birth to one using this technique,
they wrote.
While sex-selection techniques
are not new, none have been report-
ed to have the success rate that this
one does.
Earlier sperm-sorting techniques
(L.--
were found to injure many of the
sperm and lead to damaged babies,
Tendler said, and it remains to be
seen if the same will be true for the
new method.
The risk of introducing fetal
abnormalities through mechanical
and chemical manipulation during
sperm sorting is "ethically unaccept-
GENDER on page 120