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Boy or Girl
Should You Choose the Sex of Your Child?
By Virginia Gilbert
In 1998, scientists at the Genetic and IVF Institute in Fairfax, Va., stunned the medical community by patenting Microsort, a mechanical sperm sorter that gives potential parents a 90 percent chance of determining the sex of their child. Although this technique sounds like something out of a sci-fi novel, the practice of gender selection has been around in one form or another almost since the beginning of time.
As whimsical as they seem now, these methods often demonstrate deep-rooted cultural biases for children of a certain sex. In India and China, for example, the desire for a male child is still so strong that sex-selective abortion (SSA) is an accepted practice. In fact, it wasn't until 1998 that, in order to prevent SSA, the state legislature of Mahrashtra, India, passed a law banning the use of prenatal testing for the purpose of sex selection.
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