THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, September 2, 1994 TAG: 9409020588
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DIANE TENNANT, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NORFOLK LENGTH: Long : 105 lines
In an announcement that draws an ethical line in the sand, the Jones Institute for Reproductive Medicine has decided it will not help couples choose the sex of their babies in a petri dish. It thus refuses to turn a technique it pioneered into a potentially lucrative branch of in-vitro fertilization.
The institute, which helped develop the genetic test that would allow sex selection, is the first such clinic to renounce its use for that, an issue the Clinton administration has reportedly sidestepped in devising new regulations on in-vitro research. In making the policy, Jones hopes to lead other clinics to the same decision.
Only when new technology becomes available in five to 10 years will Jones consider offering sex selection, and then only to couples who already have a child of the opposite gender.
Others may not be so easy to lead, however. Last year, the Genetics and IVF Institute in Fairfax petitioned Fairfax Hospital to provide sex selection, but withdrew the proposal when it was challenged by the hospital's ethics committee.
Couples who come to the Jones Institute often ask to choose the sex of their baby, said Dr. Gary D. Hodgen, president of Jones. But sex selection is far more than a matter of human vanity and economics, he said.
``Every pre-embryo has value,'' Hodgen said. ``It's not a paper wad, it's a potential human life. If we want to see in this nation men and women be of equal value, why don't we want to see boys and girls be of equal value, and male and female pre-embryos be of equal value?''
Dr. John Fletcher, a professor of biomedical ethics at the University of Virginia, saluted the Jones Institute for its leadership stance. ``Ithink it's important and I certainly commend them,'' he said. ``That makes sense to me.''
Arguments against sex selection, he said, focus on gender discrimination and eugenics - the selection of genetic traits that some feel are superior to others. These were the same reasons the Jones Institute gave in announcing its decision.
The American Fertility Society is ``still wrestling'' with its position on sex selection, a spokeswoman said. But, she noted, Hodgen is on the society's ethics committee and, at the organization's annual meeting in November, will teach a post-graduate course that includes ethical considerations of pre-embryo diagnosis.
Hodgen led a team of Jones researchers in developing a method to take a single cell from a fertilized egg and test it for a fatal genetic disease - Tay-Sachs. Using that technique, the team chose fertilized eggs that were free of the disease and implanted them in a woman who gave birth to a healthy girl in January.
The same genetic test could be used to choose the sex of a baby before it is implanted.
But that, Hodgen said, would be acceptable only if a disease were carried solely by one gender and the aim were to prevent disease, not satisfy human vanity. Even then, he said, the technology can find ``clean'' embryos in both sexes.
Gender is determined by the sperm, which can carry either an X or Y chromosome. Eggs always carry an X chromosome. If the egg is fertilized by a Y-bearing sperm, the child will be male. If fertilized by an X-bearing sperm, the child will be female.
There are many ethical problems with sex selection, not the least of which is that scientists cannot separate X sperm from Y sperm before putting them with the eggs in the petri dish. Statistically, half the fertilized eggs would be boys and half girls. If only female eggs are implanted in the mother, that would mean the scientists choose beforehand to discard all the fertilized male eggs, whether they are healthy or not.
That is unconscionable, Hodgen said.
``Our role is not to provide just what the public asks for, not to fulfill ambitions of human vanity,'' he said. ``The priority of our work should be disease prevention or therapeutic intervention.
``Our role and our responsibility is to raise the potential of the genetically disadvantaged up to the human norm,'' Hodgen said. ``It is, by the same token, not our responsibility whatsoever to assist a few individuals to provide supranormal human traits that they feel would be advantageous.''
The latter approach, he said, leads to eugenics, the effort to improve the human race through controlling hereditary traits.
The technology that the Jones Institute helped develop for Tay-Sachs prevention involves taking a glass needle one-fifth as wide as a human hair to pull one cell from the four-cell or eight-cell fertilized egg, before it becomes an embryo.
Using that technique to satisfy couples' desire for a boy or a girl could be quite lucrative, Hodgen acknowledged.
``The Jones Institute is turning away from what might have been a very profitable enterprise,'' he said. ``But the responsibility to turn away from that is a very strong one.''
The Jones faculty brought in ethicists, religious leaders and legal advisers during the past two years as it wrestled with developing the policy, he said.
And, in the future, the institute would begin offering sex selection, but with strict conditions, Hodgen said. Only when the technology becomes available to separate X-bearing sperm from Y-bearing sperm, thus avoiding the fertilization of eggs that would be discarded, will the institute change its mind. A further condition would be applied, Hodgen said - the couple requesting a certain-sex child must already have at least one child of the opposite sex. ILLUSTRATION: File photo
``Every pre-embryo has value,'' says Dr. Gary D. Hodgen, president
of the Jones Institute for Reproductive Medicine. ``It's . . . a
potential human life.''
by CNB