Abortion and your right to accurate sex selection.

Abortion and your right to accurate sex selection.

Abortion and your right to accurate sex selection.

Science, technology, and life.
Feb. 25 2008 8:48 AM

Sexual Satisfaction

Abortion and your right to accurate sex selection.

A home pregnancy test
A home pregnancy test

How does a taboo begin to die?

William Saletan William Saletan


For an answer, look at Sunday's Los Angeles Times. "Accuracy of gender test kits in question," says the headline. The writer, Karen Kaplan, reports that many women are up in arms over home genetic tests that erred in predicting the sex of their kids. More than 100 women are suing one company. Others are calling for regulation.


Why are these women sex-testing their fetuses? Kaplan begins with a Canadian couple, Rohit and Geeta Jain:

[A]n unexpected pregnancy presented the couple with a dilemma.

She wanted to keep the baby, but Rohit wasn't sure. With two daughters already, the family's finances were a bit strained. Could they really afford a third child?

Geeta countered with another question: What if the baby were a boy?

In traditional Indian culture, sons are prized because they will grow up to manage the family resources and support their parents in old age, even lighting their funeral pyres.

All Geeta had to do was prick a finger and mail a sample of dried blood to the company's laboratory.

Notice how the new transforms the old. What's old is sex selection: choosing whether to abort your fetus based on whether it's a boy or a girl. What's new is the combination of ease, safety, and privacy with which you can now do this deed.

Early Baby Gender Mentor. Click image to expand.
Early Baby Gender Mentor

"In the past," Kaplan notes, "virtually all testing was done in medical laboratories for diagnostic purposes, such as searching for the mutations in the BRCA1 gene that are related to breast cancer." Today, however, prenatal sex tests have come down in price to $300 or less, cheap enough to sell directly to would-be parents. And instead of waiting the "10 to 16 weeks needed for traditional medical tests, such as ultrasound," you can now find out at just five to seven weeks whether you're carrying a boy or a girl. That's early enough to get the most basic surgical abortion or, possibly, a chemical abortion instead.






Eventually, we'll establish rules to ensure the safety and efficacy of fetal sex tests. At that point, we'll declare them adequately regulated. That's how a taboo begins to die.