Lies, damned lies, statistics, and media write-ups of surveys
“Half of all fertility clinics allow parents to pick gender!” trumpets the headline of an MSNBC story. (The exclamation point is implied.)
Then you read the story, and crunch some numbers. And it turns out that a whopping 1% of all IVF attempts involve non-medical pre-transfer genetic screening for sex. (PGD is used in 5% of IVF attempts. 66% of that 5% is for abnormalities incompatible with life; 12% is for “single-gene disorders” such as cystic fibrosis; 3% was to diagnose problems that affect only males, because they have only one copy of specific genes.) Note that there was no quantification of the number of those attempts that were for “balancing” family (e.g., family already has a girl, and wants a boy), nor was there any indication in the story of how many of the people who were using PGD to specify sex were going to be using IVF and PGD anyway, nor was there any information on how many of those cycles were successful, etc.
Bah.
Oh, yeah, it’s a touchy subject. But the majority of people who read that headline and that article will come away with the idea that hordes of people are using IVF to select the gender of their children.
Technorati: IVF, PGD, choosing child’s sex, media
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