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Australia is debating changing their rules against sex selection during IVF treatments.
The National Health and Medical Research Council has brought the issue in the spotlight, opening the floor to public consultation on sex selection for non-medical purposes.
Sex selection using IVF has been banned in Australia since 2004 when the NHMRC disallowed is on moral and ethical grounds.
Currently, the Ethical guidelines on the use of assisted reproductive technology in clinical practice and research states: ‘admission to life should not be conditional upon a child being a particular sex’.
‘Therefore, pending further community discussion, sex selection (by whatever means) must not be undertaken except to reduce the risk of transmission of a serious genetic condition.’
The call for public consultation could see these guidelines changed.
This just reaffirms my position that science and playing God leads to scary consequences. We live in a society that has decided that since we have the technology that it gives us the right to use it. We have people that are choosing not to kids that are perfectly able and people that are having kids outside of the womb and leaving some to freeze or die while the parents cherry pick the gender. It won’t be long until we start filtering out all sorts of attributes. This should concern everyone.
