| Home
> Baby Mine News Center
> Brave New Babies
Brave New Babies
Click here to
see our selection of Baby and Toddler products.
Parents now have the power to choose the sex of their
children. But as technology answers prayers, it also raises some
troubling questions
Grant Delin for Newsweek
Mary, left, and Sam Toedtman chose the sex of their nine-month-old
daughter Natalie, center, to balance out their boys Jesse, 15 in
the back, Jacob, 10, and Lucas, 7
Health Advice
• Submit questions on heart disease to Harvard cardiologist
Dr. Paula Johnson.
By Claudia Kalb
Jan. 26 issue - Sharla Miller of Gillette, Wyo., always wanted a
baby girl, but the odds seemed stacked against her. Her husband,
Shane, is one of three brothers, and Sharla and her five siblings
(four girls, two boys) have produced twice as many males as females.
After the Millers' first son, Anthony, was born in 1991, along came
Ashton, now 8, and Alec, 4. Each one was a gift, says Sharla, but
the desire for a girl never waned. "I'm best friends with my
mother," she says. "I couldn't get it out of my mind that
I wanted a daughter." Two years ago Sharla, who had her fallopian
tubes tied after Alec's birth, began looking into adopting a baby
girl. In the course of her Internet research, she stumbled upon
a Web site for the Fertility Institutes in Los Angeles, headed by
Dr. Jeffrey Steinberg, where she learned about an in vitro fertilization
technique called preimplantation genetic diagnosis. By creating
embryos outside the womb, then testing them for gender, PGD could
guarantee—with almost 100 percent certainty—the sex
of her baby. Price tag: $18,480, plus travel. Last November Sharla's
eggs and Shane's sperm were mixed in a lab dish, producing 14 healthy
embryos, seven male and seven female. Steinberg transferred three
of the females into Sharla's uterus, where two implanted successfully.
If all goes well, the run of Miller boys will end in July with the
arrival of twin baby girls. "I have three wonderful boys,"
says Sharla, "but since there was a chance I could have a daughter,
why not?"
The brave new world is definitely here. After 25 years of staggering
advances in reproductive medicine—first test-tube babies,
then donor eggs and surrogate mothers—technology is changing
baby-making in a whole new way. No longer can science simply help
couples have babies, it can help them have the kind of babies they
want. Choosing gender may obliterate one of the fundamental mysteries
of procreation, but for people who have grown accustomed to taking
3-D ultrasounds of fetuses, learning a baby's sex within weeks of
conception and scheduling convenient delivery dates, it's simply
the next logical step. That gleeful exclamation, "It's a boy!"
or "It's a girl!" may soon just be a quaint reminder of
how random births used to be.
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3990134/
|
