The guy who runs the sex selection program sounds kind of clueless to me, but I guess that's how you have to be in that field. As you can see from the site, they are doing cutting edge work.
Now some Indians are traveling from India to The Fertility Institutes, which claims to run the largest sex-selection program in the world. Dr. Jeffrey Steinberg, medical director of the gender selection program at the Fertility Institutes says 25 percent of his Indian patients travel from India to Los Angeles for the $18,000 procedure. Steinberg affirms that the institute’s ads “absolutely” target the ethnic media because “there’s a strong preference in certain ethnic groups for gender selection, one way or another, boy or girl.” The Fertility Institutes devote 5 percent of its advertising to ethnic media. “The 5 percent brings in about 20 percent of our business,” Steinberg said.
The clinic uses pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), which allows doctors to choose embryos on the basis of different criteria like health or sex. When he started getting requests from couples to use PGD to choose the sex of their next child, Steinberg said he accommodated their requests. “It’s certainly a tool that’s available, and I’m not going to deny it to anyone,” he said.
As an Indian American girl, I know very well the preference for boys in my community and I think that this whole thing is mad scary. Now basically, rich Indian families can pay for sons instead of dealing with the burden of daughters -- and they will do it. And do we really now all the side effects of this kind of genetic tampering? What does sex selection do to people? And once we pick the sex of our babies, isn't it just a slippery slope to further genetic modifications. Well, if they are going to do it, maybe they should start here.
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