Report on sex selection launched today

The Human Fertilisation and Embryology's recommendations on sex selection will be revealed at a meeting in the House of Commons today. "There are very worrying indications that the HFEA will endorse social sex selection,'" said Josephine Quintavalle, spokesperson for Comment on Reproductive Ethics (CORE). "We believe, however, that in the first instance it will only permit sperm sorting procedures. "The deliberate creation of a child of one sex rather than the other, however achieved, will always be an act of discrimination, a statement that one human being is better than another, and in no shape or form should this be tolerated in a modern compassionate society. "Sex selection in the UK is marketed as family balancing, an example of our consumer society at its basest. The life, dignity and rights of a child cannot be reduced to concepts of a balancing act. "In India social sex selection has resulted in an appalling gender genocide which has claimed the lives of tens of millions of unborn and new born girl babies. Anybody wishing to see the true face of social sex selection should go to the UNFPA website and access their publication 'Missing: Mapping the Adverse Child Sex Ratio India', where the catastrophic consequences of this philosophy can be seen in their ruthless reality. "The UK should give the best example to the rest of the world, especially to those countries fighting so courageously against sex discrimination."