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Cross-Border Gender Selection: Cdns Travel South for Service Banned Here

Posted on: Monday, 19 December 2005, 18:00 CST

By ANNE-MARIE TOBIN

(CP) - Melissa Vatkin is seven months pregnant, happily awaiting the birth of a baby girl. But unlike expectant parents who find out the gender of their child part-way through a pregnancy, after amniocentesis or ultrasound, Vatkin has known from the beginning. She and her husband travelled to a Los Angeles clinic for sex-selection, a practice that's banned in Canada by the Assisted Human Reproduction Act.

Their daughter "desperately wanted to have a sister," Vatkin, 36, said matter-of-factly from her home in Vancouver. "After her, we had two boys and she was very upset by it, so we kept promising her we would have a little girl so that she would have a sister.

"It started that way, with our daughter, trying to please her - at 2 1/2 years old, if you can believe it!"

Dr. Jeffrey Steinberg, who treated Vatkin, acknowledges it's controversial - ethicists have taken aim at his practice - but says there's demand for it, and Canadians make up a sizable portion of his patients.

"Of course, some are coming down because they don't want to be on waiting lists (for fertility treatments in Canada), but a lot are coming down because of the uniqueness of what we do - the gender selection, the egg freezing," he said.

"We see people from every country, but Canada is over-represented."

He estimates 30 to 40 Canadian babies have been born after their parents used the gender selection services of the Fertility Institutes, where laboratory workers analyze embryos for X and Y chromosomes.

"We'll see about 20 to 25 egg freezing patients a month, and three or four of them are Canadian. And on gender selection we see about 50 a month and gosh, it seems like 10 - 10 out of 50 - which is 20 per cent, it's just a huge number of Canadians," said Steinberg, a father of three who says his own two girls and a boy were conceived "the old-fashioned way."

The clinic says it has a 100 per cent success rate in sex selection.

Canada's legislation says no person can knowingly "for the purpose of creating a human being, perform any procedure or provide, prescribe or administer any thing that would ensure or increase the probability that an embryo will be of a particular sex, or that would identify the sex of an in vitro embryo, except to prevent, diagnose or treat a sex-linked disorder or disease."

But Health Canada spokeswoman Jirina Vlk noted "we can't prevent people from travelling."

Francoise Baylis, a professor of bioethics and philosophy at Dalhousie University, vehemently supports the Canadian stance, enacted in 2004.

"I think that there are many feminist scholars who would say that sex selection ultimately undermines equality between the sexes," she said from Halifax.

"It is primarily discriminatory towards women and female children. And we do in Canada recognize a societal obligation to promote equality and it's on those grounds that one would oppose sex discrimination ... Sex selection is ultimately about sex discrimination, therefore it's a public policy issue, it is not a private choice."

Beyond that, she said parents are choosing very specific social roles for their child, and by valuing those roles they are in fact trapping people in those roles.

Those who pick a boy might have in mind a particular set of behaviours.

"You don't have in your mind, for example, a gay man. You don't have in your mind an effeminate man. You don't have in your mind a man who likes to cook rather than play soccer," said Baylis.

"So what's happening when you say you're making a particular choice, . . . you are then saying that you value a stereotype, you value a particular role rather than valuing a child who has, in fact, ahead of them an open future."

Steinberg said Canadians seem to have a preference for girls, but his clients from China select males most often.

He noted one American ethicist has criticized the practice because of the cost, noting that poor people can't afford it. The price tag, from start to finish, is $18,500 US.

Women are given fertility drugs for about three weeks so they will produce 10 to 20 eggs in a one-month cycle.

"We then remove those eggs, vaginally, add the husband's sperm to the eggs, and let the eggs fertilize," said Steinberg. "Normally we grow the eggs for three to five days and give them back to mom. When we're doing sex selection, after the three days, instead of giving them back to mom, we biopsy one cell off of each embryo.

"The embryo at that point has eight cells. So we take one of those eight cells off the embryo. It does not harm the embryo, no damage at all. The embryo stays growing nicely."

Over the next 24 hours, a team of scientists amplifies the DNA in that one tiny microscopic fragment.

"If we find two X chromosomes we've got a healthy girl," said Steinberg. "If we find one X and one Y we've got a healthy boy."

Couples choose an embryo for implantation and decide what to do with the remainder: donate them to research (California has a stem cell project), freeze them for future use, donate them to another couple or destroy them.

"The destruction route is extraordinarily rare," Steinberg said.

But not every attempt to produce a baby works. He says women under 35 have a first-time success rate of about 55 per cent; it's 45 per cent for women age 35 to 40, and women over 40 have only a 20 per cent chance of first-time success.

It wasn't quick and easy for Vatkin - she began her attempt 2 1/2 years ago, had fertility problems and made seven trips overall to L.A. - but she says the cost was worth it.

"A human life is definitely worth anything, I'd say."

As she awaits her baby's due date, she makes no apologies for acquiescing to the wishes of her eldest child, who's now seven.

"I always wanted a sister growing up also, and didn't have one," she said wistfully.

"So I knew how important it was to have somebody in your life, another girl, a sister."

Source: Canadian Press

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