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Ivf Essay

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“For years, reproductive specialists have been helping people become parents, even enabling them to choose the sex of their baby. One fertility doctor is taking things a step further, offering what some are calling ‘designer babies,’ as Early Show national correspondent Hattie Kauffman reports” (CBS News). Though designer babies are not yet feasible, choosing the gender of the baby is. This is possible through in-vitro fertilization, a process in which an egg is retrieved from a mother and sperm is donated by a father, then combined together in a lab to make a fertilized egg. During this process, it is possible for the parents to allow the egg to go through Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis. PGD is when embryologists remove a cell from the …show more content…

This proves that natural labor is much less hazardous than implantation. This alone should make gender selection seem like a ridiculous idea. The risks are simply not worth the result of whether caring for a baby boy or girl. Opposers argue, “Knowing the gender of an embryo prior to implantation can be helpful especially if a parent carries an X-linked disorder, which means the disease in question is carried on the X (sex) chromosome. A child receives 23 chromosomes from the mother, and 23 from the father, however, the father is always responsible for the gender of the child. The mother contributes an X sex chromosome to her child, and male sperm either contains an X or a Y chromosome. If a sperm containing a Y chromosome fertilizes an egg, the gender will be male (XY). If a sperm carrying an X chromosome fertilizes an egg, the gender will be female (XX). If the mother is a carrier of an X-linked disorder and becomes pregnant with a boy, there is a 50% chance he will be affected since he only has one X chromosome inherited from his mother. In contrast, if a man carries an X-linked dominant disorder 100% of his daughters will have the disease. These gender-based genetic inheritance patterns make gender selection of embryos not only useful, but potentially life-changing, since the disease rates in certain genders can be so high. In these cases, rather than testing for the actual disorder, embryos can be selected based on gender to reduce

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