A new test promises to identify the sex of a child within six weeks of conception. It's marketed as a tool to help parents pick out the right clothes and toys -- but ultrasound testing, available at a later stage in pregnancy, does the same thing while still leaving plenty of time to paint the nursery.
Unsurprisingly, many predict that parents will use the test -- dubbed "Pink or Blue" -- to select the sex of their offspring by aborting babies of an unwanted gender.
Coverage of the test has been spotty. The Telegraph implies that sex selection is a pro-life concern -- which it's not. A radical imbalance between male and female births, as seen in China and India, is a broad social concern. That sex selective abortions are used primarily to prevent girls from being born is a concern for anyone with feminist sympathies. (According to the pro-choice Center for Genetics and
Society, some put the number of "missing girls" in South and East Asia
at 100 million.)
The Daily Telegraph (no relation) calls the Pink or Blue test the
"first of its kind." It's not. Amazingly, not a single story mentions the Baby Gender Mentor, which came out a few years ago, does the same thing, and prompted both the exact same ethical concerns (NPR feature here) and a class-action lawsuit. The
Baby Gender Mentor, like Pink or Blue, is unregulated by the FDA and other national health agencies; unlike ultrasound, hard data on the tests'
accuracy doesn't exist. The lawsuit involves mothers who were
mistakenly informed that their babies had chromosomal abnormalities.
In some cases -- as when a baby has a high risk of a gender-linked genetic defect -- tests like Pink or Blue and the Baby Gender Mentor are justified. Apart from those cases, though, the utility and ethics of the tests are highly questionable. Personally, I think the tests should be closely regulated and available only in special circumstances. Of course, that's a decision that society has to make after careful delibration -- but the sort of sloppy coverage surrounding Pink and Blue makes careful deliberation unlikely.
Test can tell baby’s sex 6 weeks into pregnancy [Associated Press]
Early baby sex test causes abortion fear [Telegraph]
Pick-your-baby test investigated [Daily Telegraph]
Original photographs: mradwin / tiarescott
