embryo screening

The smiling young woman in a red dress who stared out from the front page of The Times yesterday does not much look like the face of eugenics. Yet to her critics, she is about to cross an ethical boundary.

Boy or girl? Almost half of U.S. fertility clinics that offer embryo screening say they allow couples to choose the sex of their child, the most extensive survey of the practice suggests. Gender selection without any medical reason to warrant it was performed in about 9 percent of all embryo screenings last year, the survey found.