Jackie Leach Scully was interviewed today by Patrick Tyner for BBC Radio Newcastle’s Alfie and Charlie at Breakfast on the topic of prenatal sex selection for social rather than medical reasons.
Jackie drew on the results of the Ordinary Ethics project which was funded by the Wellcome Trust from 2002-2004, in which she, Tom Shakespeare and Sarah Banks (Durham University) investigated the views of lay people on choosing the sex of a baby before birth. Although not legal in this country, anecdotal evidence suggests people from the UK are travelling to other countries to do so, and there have been recent reports of home kits which can be used to test for the sex of a foetus, raising difficult ethical issues about the limits to the parents' rights to reproductive control.
published on: 16th August 2011