/Health • Open Yoga Classes • Workshops • Private Instruction • Teacher Training • Retreats •Massage Therapy Come in and see what everyone is talking about! 29121 Northwestern Hwy. at 12 Mile • 248 386 YOGA - - Gender Selection Concerns Ethicists DEBRA NUSSBAUM COHEN Special to The Jewish News T IF YOU'RE SERIOUS ABOUT YOUR FITNESS Let us help you be the best you can be with 1 on 1 training at our club. A patient friendly program designed just for you to help you reach your realistic fitness goals. Change your life by changing your lifestyle. Muscle therapy and nutritional consulting available. Call us today for a FREE consultation. INTERNATIONAL PHYSIQUE CHAMPION •TV Celebrity Anchor PETER NIELSEN'S • Nutritional Counseling • MusclelMassage Therapy Personal Trainin i Club 4119 Orchard Lake Rd. (at Pontiac Tr.) West Bloomfield Visit our website www.peternielsen.com • Children's Fitness Programs • Free Consultation (248) 855-0345 INSTITUTE OF MEDICAL WEIGHT MANAGEMENT • Jensen Counseling Centers, P.C. Mary Robin Peters, M.D., Francine Friedman, M.D. A Diet Program That Works • Board certified physicians, nurses, & • Medically supervised & individualized nutrition counselors. weight loss program. • Stress, depression and anxiety reduction • Medication management & follow-up. • PMS, hormonal regulation, & sexual • Personal fitness training. dysfunction. • Nutrition, diet counseling & • Child, adolescent & adult eating disorders. behavioral therapy. •Flexible Fee Schedule Available Sat. and Evening Hours • Most Insurance Accepted 26105 Orchard Lake Road • Farmington Hills Just North of 11 Mile 248 478-4411 (248) 541-6820 *120 S. Main street s Nutrition is our business Discount health load supermarket !people inforri,on, refe for so d access to selsiices addl.° for o l de r 11/20 1998 110 — er in %/N: 5503; op Jew 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