Paris Hilton said she is beginning the process of in-vitro fertilization (IVF) with her boyfriend Carter Reum on Tuesday.
IVF is a fertility treatment that takes an egg and a sperm and fertilizes them in a lab, rather than during sex, to help couples conceive. During an interview in an episode of “The Trend Reporter with Mara”, Hilton said Kim Kardashian was the person who told her about the process, suggesting her own doctor.
The 39-year-old heiress said she wanted to start the process now to ensure she could have “twins that are a boy and a girl,” since parents can, for an added cost, select which embryos they want to use.
“I think it’s something most women should do just to have and then you can pick if you want boys or girls,” Hilton said. “The only way to 100% have that is by doing it that way.”
Hilton’s words were met with some pushback on social media, as many people who undergo IVF struggle to have any healthy embryos, let alone enough to chose between them for their sex.
What’s more, experts say selecting embryos by sex is ethically complicated.
Many felt Hilton’s comments were “out of touch” and insensitive to people struggling with infertility who can’t afford IVF, a procedure that can cost upwards of $12,000.
“Millions of women across this country cannot have access to IVF due to lack of funding and insurance coverage — women/men with actual medical diagnoses — and even after they finance and go through all the struggles of even getting to IVF, it’s no guarantee that they end up with a healthy baby,” one Instagram user wrote. “For her to make this statement is so beyond infuriating to me on the basis she did it to get twins and choose the sex.”
Preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) is a process that can be included with IVF that screens the embryos for what sex they will be by looking if they have XX (female), XY (male), or XXY (intersex) chromosomes.
According to CNBC, this process can cost upwards of $20,000 and isn’t an actual guarantee that the embryos will take and each a full pregnancy. All PGD does is use the embryos with the desired sex, as many people who go through IVF struggle with their embryos implanting.
“IVF is not a simple case of choosing what embryos and how many embryos to transfer providing they are good quality. She needs to read up on the harsh reality of IVF,” one commenter on Instagram wrote under a post by Pregnantish.
The ethics behind choosing a baby’s gender have long been debated by experts in the biomedical field.
According to Dr. William Keye, an OB/GYN at the University of Utah Health, there are concerns that it is a slippery slope, potentially leading to an imbalanced population between sexes in places where a certain gender is given preferential treatment.
An editorial published in the BMJ’s Journal of Ethics warned sexism could play into sex selection, as it could cause more people to opt for male embryos than female embryos.
In addition to being an expensive procedure many people in the US can’t afford, the idea of “picking” a child’s gender before they are born may present some problems.
Since a child could be transgender, and may not identify with the gender they are assigned at birth, no one truly knows what gender their child will be.
Source: insider.com