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began offering gender selection for non-medical reasons
through costly, often invasive medical procedures.
But it's been taken to a different level by purveyors
of unproven home-use products, who are milking the
increasing awareness about more legitimate sex selection
methods and hoping to draw some of the same potential
customers, said University of Pennsylvania bioethicist
Arthur Caplan.
The only two medical procedures that experts say are
legitimate - a method requiring in vitro fertilization
and the experimental MicroSort sperm-sorting technique
- have raised ethical concerns about designer babies
and gender bias.
A Fairfax, Va., clinic that offers the $2,300 MicroSort
technique recently ran national newspaper ads seeking
to recruit patients with the headline: "Do you
want to choose the gender of your next baby?"
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home-use products that guarantee results with things
like douches, vitamins and do-it-yourself artificial
insemination kits pose different ethical problems
because "they're promising things they can't
deliver," Caplan said.
"There absolutely is an audience of people who
are interested in" gender selection, said Richard
Rawlins, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology
research at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago.
"The old standby is 'caveat emptor - buyer beware.'
"
One home-use product is the GenSelect system, featuring
boy and girl kits offered over the Internet at $199
apiece plus shipping. It is touted as being 96 percent
effective if properly used. GenSelect |
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patents were approved earlier this year,
said Dr. Scott Sweazy, a South Carolina urologist who helped
create the system.
The kits include a thermometer to help predict ovulation,
special douches and "gender specific" mineral
and herbal pills.
Sweazy said thousands of kits have been sold worldwide since
the Web site started three years ago, and that business
has tripled in the past year. He said he did not have information
on how many babies of the desired gender have been born
with GenSelect, and a spokesman said sales figures are confidential.
"We have some people who didn't get the gender that
they chose," Sweazy said, "but virtually every
one of them didn't do it right."
Veronica Moister of Lake Worth, Fla. said she's almost seven
months pregnant with the girl she wanted thanks to GenSelect.
She found their site while Web surfing and was pretty doubtful
at first.
"It seemed far-fetched and it was online so you never
know what you're getting," said Moister, 32, who already
has a young son.
She said she and her husband considered MicroSort but didn't
want to travel to Virginia, so they tried the low-tech method
instead, figuring they'd be perfectly happy if they conceived
a boy instead.
Moister said she became a convert when she learned she was
carrying a girl.
Many doctors remain skeptical and say luck mostly explains
such success stories.
Some "old wives' tales" methods like timing intercourse
close to ovulation for a boy or douching with vinegar for
a girl could theoretically slightly improve a couple's chances
of success, but they're scientifically unproven, Rawlins
said.
Fertility specialist Dr. Norbert Gleicher called such products
"snake oil."
Gleicher made headlines three years ago when his Chicago
and New York clinics became among the nation's first to
offer sex selection for non-medical reasons using a technique
called preimplantation genetic screening.
The method analyzes embryos created through in vitro fertilization
and was designed to help couples at risk for having children
with inherited genetic diseases. The screening can detect
healthy embryos and their gender with nearly 100 percent
accuracy. But once the desired embryo has been selected,
pregnancy through IVF is not a sure thing and several tries
costing tens of thousands of dollars often are necessary.
Dr. Panayiotis Zavos, a Kentucky doctor whose controversial
human cloning experiments have made headlines, offers preimplantation
screening for gender selection at his Lexington clinic.
But Zavos also recently started selling a home-based sex
selection method with a $975 sperm collection and artificial
insemination kit available on the Internet.
Customers send in a sperm sample in a special shipping box
via overnight express. It undergoes a 2?/2-hour separating
technique at Zavos' Lexington laboratory and is returned
to customers who are instructed how to perform artificial
insemination.
Zavos said he uses a "sedimentation method" to
separate male and female sperm, though he declined to detail
how it works. He quoted success rates of 80 percent for
boys and about 78 percent for girls. He wouldn't discuss
sales figures.
Dr. Marian Damewood, president of the American Society of
Reproductive Medicine, questioned whether sperm would remain
viable during the shipping back and forth and said she "would
not put a lot of faith" in such products.
Rawlins also doubted the claims and said Zavos' "reputation
among the field of assisted reproduction technologists is
zero."
Zavos dismissed the criticism.
"Everybody has the right to be skeptical," he
said. "I haven't sold a bottle of snake oil. Everything
I've done is obviously by the book."
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