Sex Selection Goes Mainstream

By Marcy Darnovsky, AlterNet. Posted September 25, 2003.

Several times over the past few months, a small but striking ad from a Virginia-based fertility clinic has appeared in the Sunday Styles section of the New York Times. Alongside a smiling baby, its boldface headline asks, "Do You Want To Choose the Gender Of Your Next Baby?"

If so, the ad continues, you can join "prospective parents...from all over the world" who come to the Genetics & IVF Institute (GIVF) for an "exclusive scientifically-based sperm sorting gender selection procedure." The technique, known by the trademarked name MicroSort, is offered as a way to choose a girl or boy either for the "prevention of genetic diseases" (selecting against the sex affected by an X-linked or Y-linked condition) or for "family balancing" (selecting for a girl in a family that already has one or more boys, or vice versa).

GIVF has been promoting MicroSort on its Web site for several years, and a few other fertility clinics offer other "family balancing" methods online. But the MicroSort ads in the New York Times represent a bolder and higher-profile approach. They mark the first time that high-tech methods for sex selection, and their use for clearly social purposes, have been openly marketed in a mainstream US publication.

Two years ago, when newspapers aimed at Indian expatriates in the United States and Canada carried fertility clinic ads for sex selection, the Times covered the event as a news story. The article included hard-hitting criticism from Indian feminists in the United States, and discussed the hugely skewed sex ratios in South and East Asia (some demographers estimate as many as 100 million "missing girls") that are the result of female infanticide, neglect of girl babies, and prenatal diagnosis followed by sex-selective abortion. It noted that the sex-selection ads would be illegal in India, and reported that one of the publications dropped them after controversy erupted.

The Times has also covered other aspects of the debate about sex selection. To date, however, it has taken no note of the MicroSort ad campaign. Nor have other newspapers.

The Marketing Tactics

GIVF's ads note that MicroSort sperm sorting is currently "investigational," and is being used in the context of an FDA clinical trial. But the company is marketing the procedure with a classic consumer come-on: It promises "FREE MicroSort for qualifying patients" who sign up for either its "Donor Egg" or "Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis" program. GIVF repeats the offer in a pop-up ad on its MicroSort website, where another smiling baby sits in front of a pink-and-blue double helix.

Both egg "donation" and pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, or PGD (in which embryos are produced outside the body, and then screened and selected for genetic characteristics) require that women undergo an invasive egg-harvesting procedure. Sex selection via sperm sorting is usually accomplished by artificial insemination, and so doesn't require egg harvesting or in vitro fertilization. GIVF's offer can thus be read as luring women to undergo riskier (and in the case of PGD, more expensive) procedures.

The MicroSort Story

The technology behind MicroSort was developed in the late 1980s by a government scientist at the US Department of Agriculture for use in producing livestock. In 1992, USDA granted GIVF founder Dr. Joseph Schulman an exclusive US license to apply the method in humans for the patent's full 17-year life. The first MicroSort baby was born in 1995.

GIVF's Schulman is not only a technical and entrepreneurial pioneer of sex selection, but also an early popularizer of the notion of "family balancing." The concept has been floated in assisted reproduction circles as a justification for sex selection at least since the early 1990s. According to the website Word Spy, which traces the origins and usage of recently coined words and phrases, the earliest use of the term in the mainstream media was a quote from Schulman in a 1994 Fortune article.

"Family balancing" is, of course, an application of high-tech sex selection with considerable commercial potential. GIVF's base charge for MicroSort is $2300; couples try an average of three times before a pregnancy is achieved or they drop out. When Fortune followed up on MicroSort in 2001 with a long article, it quoted an analyst at OrbiMed Advisors, an asset management firm focused on the "global healthcare industry," who estimated a market for sperm sorting in the US alone of "between $200 million and $400 million, if [it] is aggressively marketed".

The Fertility Industry's Trade Organization

It's difficult to imagine that such projections did not play some role in a 2001 decision by the American Society of Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) -- the fertility industry's trade organization -- to give an ethical go-ahead to sperm sorting for "family balancing." A report by its Ethics Committee noted but overrode a range of social and ethical objections, including those that led to its rejection, just two years earlier, of using PGD for such purposes. In that earlier report, ASRM explicitly acknowledged that both PGD and sperm sorting have "the potential to reinforce gender bias in a society".

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