The battle of the sexes

Nick Morrison looks at the truth behind sex selection - and asks whether it's really a slippery slope to designer children.

THE Ancient Greeks didn't have much call for women. They may have invented democracy, but that was strictly for the men. Women were expected to be neither seen nor heard; instead they were to stay indoors and perform their domestic tasks, and according to the orator Pericles, even mentioning women in public was shameful. With women so clearly designated as inferior, it was hardly surprising that they simply took their unwanted newborn baby girls to the hills and abandoned them to die.

More than 2,000 years later, discarding female offspring still goes on. In India, the advent of tests which revealed the sex of an unborn baby led to a sharp fall in the number of women giving birth to girls. Even though such tests were banned seven years ago, they can be had at a price, as can the subsequent terminations.

Giving birth to a girl, particularly for the first born, is seen as bringing shame on a woman in a society which values boys as symbols of male prowess and in ensuring the family line continues. Daughters can also prove costly: the combination of dowry and wedding expenses can set a family back by more than a million rupees, when a mid-ranking civil servant can expect to earn 10,000 rupees a year.

Census figures released this week showed that India has 927 girls for every 1,000 boys. The disparity is greatest in the wealthiest areas, including Delhi, with just 850 girls to every 1,000 boys. In most other countries, that figure would be around 990. Nearly 50 million women are missing from the Indian population.

It is perhaps against this background that 80 per cent of the British public are opposed to allowing parents to choose the sex of their baby. The survey, carried out as part of a year-long study, helped bring the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) to the conclusion that gender selection should continue to be carried out only for medical reasons in this country. For many people, the idea of parents choosing to have a boy, or a girl, for social reasons, is unacceptable.

But not everyone agrees. Dr Kamal Ahuja, scientific director of the Cromwell IVF Centre at the Woodlands Hospital in Darlington, says he can understand why the HFEA wanted to keep in step with public opinion, but argues that there are circumstances where sex selection is not unethical.

"I have no doubt that there are some properly assessed, properly counselled cases where it is justifiable. It is not something that should be commercially used for the heck of it, but it is something that should be available for those that need it," he says.

Couples who seek to choose the sex of their child often cite family balance as the reason. "If somebody has five daughters and they're desperate to bring a son into the family, I don't see there is anything wrong with that - if the technology can guarantee that, it would be in the best interests of the patient," Dr Ahuja adds.

But he rejects the notion that gender selection could lead to designer babies. Not only is the technology some way off, but society will not allow parents to tick off their unborn babies against a checklist, he argues.

'The slippery slope argument is often levelled at genetics - we have heard all sorts of horror stories about IVF, but IVF is 25 years old and I'm not sure they've come to pass. Common sense prevails in the end, and there are enough checks and balances in our society to ensure these things don't become too skewed one way or the other.

"And I'm not sure that a couple with five daughters who want a son is equivalent to saying their next son should have certain features or ought to be an engineer. My faith is with the consumer: they simply don't want those choices," he says.

One family looking for balance is Alan and Louise Masterton, from Dundee. The parents of four sons, their daughter Nicole was born in 1995. But four years later, Nicole suffered horrific burns and died. Now the only option for the Mastertons if they are going to guarantee the daughter they desperately want is to go abroad.

Alan Masterton says he is not trying to replace Nicole, but instead to replace the female element their daughter brought to the family. "Nicole brought a whole different aspect to our family," he says. "Her interaction with the boys, her interaction with myself and indeed with Louise, was completely different from the experience we had with the boys.

"This isn't a want. This is a need that we have, but we cannot have it done in our own country. The people who cannot afford to go abroad just do not have a choice."

Earlier this year, Nicole Chenery, a mother of four boys, revealed she was pregnant with twin girls after spending £6,000 on gender selection treatment at a clinic in Spain. The property developer, from Devon, said she always wanted a daughter. And last year, it emerged that a couple from the North-East had undergone treatment in the US to give them a daughter to add to their three boys.

As the mother of five boys, Northern Echo columnist Ruth Campbell is often faced with disbelief when she tells people she never wanted a girl instead of another boy.

"After I had two boys, everybody said I must be longing for a girl. I was constantly telling people I really didn't mind, and I genuinely can't understand people who want one sex rather than the other," she says. "I think it is arrogant to think you can pick and choose what babies you want.

"I would have loved a girl just as much, but I can't say I would rather have a girl instead of any of the boys. Once you have had a child, you would not be without any of them."

Professor Alison Murdoch, consultant gynaecologist at the Centre for Life in Newcastle, and chairwoman of the British Fertility Society, says the HFEA made the right decision in maintaining the restriction on gender selection, because the technology has not been proven to be safe, and because public opinion is overwhelmingly opposed. But both of these may change.

"My personal view is that I think the family balancing issue is something that we could consider. I can understand why, if people have two boys, they might want a girl - I can't see the harm in them making that decision; it is not loving the other children any less," she says.

The danger comes, she says, when sex selection becomes sex discrimination, and allowing parents to choose the sex of their baby will not prevent them from doing it because they value boys higher than girls. Indeed, Dr Ahuja says that the response to the gender selection dilemma may differ from country to country.

"If we were addressing this question in a country like India, where people tend to go for boys rather than girls, we may say that legislation is required, but I don't think there is any evidence of that sort in this country. This is a country where there is zero population growth, and I would have thought reproductive choices are going to be important."