By Hilary White
DONOSTIA-SAN SEBASTIAN, Spain, January 3, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A Spanish hospital has announced it has succeeded in carrying out an embryonic sex-selection in order to ensure that a patient would only give birth to a female child in order to avoid possibly passing on inherited eye disease.
The Assisted Reproduction unit of Quir’n Hospital in Donostia-San Sebastian, said this is the first time a sex-selection of an embryonic child has been successful in the Basque Country region of Spain. No information was available as to the fate of the “selected” male embryos.
The mother is a carrier of the gene that causes the degenerative disease Retinosis Pigmentaria (RP), a genetic condition that causes a progressive loss of vision. The gene is found in both men and women, but men that carry it have a 50% chance of suffering symptoms, according to the Medical News Today report. A male child, therefore was unacceptable since he could possibly have suffered from future blindness.
The attempt to use selective breeding for desired traits, called ‘eugenics,’ was discredited after it formed the pseudo-scientific cornerstone of the Nazi “racial hygene” ideology.
Eugenics is back in vogue today, however, with the advent of in vitro fertilization and genetic testing techniques. With the success of the Human Genome Project in which the entire genetic makeup of human DNA was mapped, scientists now aim at perfecting techniques to “select” only those embryos that are free of genetic abnormalities or potential illnesses.
With new terms such as “inheritable genetic modification,” and “germline genetic engineering,” scientists such as Nobel Prize winning geneticist James Watson, promote the idea that the human race can be re-engineered to new heights of perfection. At a conference at UCLA in 1998, Watson dismissed criticism, saying, “If we could make better human beings by knowing how to add genes, why shouldn’t we do it? What’s wrong with it? Who is telling us not to [do] it?”
Read related LifeSiteNews.com coverage:
Why Embryonic Stem Cell Research? It’s About Human Engineering, Not Ending Disease
https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2006/may/06050902.html