Gender Pre-selection

[al-muslimah]

Salam Alaycom everybody

I'm doing a research about sex pre selection. It's an interesting topic. I wanted to know your different opinions about it. What do you think about it? Is it good? is it bad?

I think it could play both ways. Some people would love to have girls since all they have are boys and vice versa. It may be bad in playing god's work in choosing the sex of the child.

BTW how is this issue treated islamicly?

Walasalm

 

[Hard Rock Moslem]

Wa'alaikum salam.

Sisters, pls scroll down you will find previous threads that discussed almost the same issue. Let's us know anything else we can help you.

Salam to you dear brothers and sisters,

I think we need to assist our sister in her research.

 

[abu'muhammad]

:salam2:

The killing of foetus , deciding whether to birth boy or girl or not, is not from Islam. These are imported traits. Unless unavoidable reasons or situations are there they should be given birth whether it’s boy or girl. The interpretation of ayah of quran I remind from memory is – ‘Allah gives to some boys, to some girls, to some nothing.’ I will refer this ayah here, inshaAllah.

muslims are thankful to Allah for this blessing. Many of the messengers have prayed for pious child like Ibrahim and Zakariyah alayhis salaam and were thankful to Allah, as He gave them child in old age. In surah Ibrahim, Allah revealed what ibrahim Alayhis salaam made duas for their children and is thankful to Allah that He gave him child Ismail alayhis salaam. Further we see many people make dua to have child. Some people have children after long time and they know what children are ! the killing of baby foetus has pagan roots, as same as mushriks before used to do before the advent of prophet (salla Allahu alayhi wasallam) And we know there is lot reward in bringing up the children, especially female baby. Even Islam does not allow harassment to animals or dumb living organisms, For them there are many rules regarding when and how to kill animals. the familiar case is making sacrifice during bakr - eid. The slaughter has to be in Islamic way.

And Allah only knows what is in womb whether its boy or girl. The hadith regarding is as below.

Narrated from Ibn ‘Umar (may Allaah be pleased with him), that the Messenger of Allaah (sallaAllahu alayhi wasallam) said:

‘The keys of the Unknown are five, which no-one knows except Allaah: no-one knows what will happen tomorrow except Allaah; no-one knows what is in the wombs except Allaah; no-one knows when it will rain except Allaah; no-one knows in which land he will die; and no-one knows when the Hour will begin except Allaah." (Saheeh al-Bukhaari, Kitaab Tafseer al-Qur’aan, hadeeth no. 4328).

 

[soeurette]

Assalam Alaikum

I don't know I think pre-selection is too Gattacaish (I don't know if you've ever seen the movie) but I think that if you start with gender, then its like what next, soon we would have designer babies and I think science needs to learn where to stop, I can understand if people want to be sure that they aren't passing on defective genes and give their children as healthy a possible a life as they can, but to choose gender or what colour eyes your child has is just wrong and shallow. But as asifvohra said we should be grateful for any child that Allah (SWT) chooses to give us.

 

[ShyHijabi]

Salaam,

There are two ways to do gender preselection, microsort (the sperm is seperated by centrifuge) and PGD (this is done in IVF before the 4-6 cell embryo is implanted in the mother). Gender selection is usually only done in the case where there are deadly genetic defects related to one sex or another. Most doctors will not do gender selection otherwise as it is deemed unethical by most fertility docs. Microsort will be done in cases of "family balancing" where the parents have many children of one sex but not the other as it is nothing more than presorting sperm.

Neither method "kills a fetus" and this wouldn't really fall under the haram rulings. Both methods are costly and not likely to be used very often as there are ethical boundaries and monetary considerations. I kind of roll my eyes when people immediately jump to the "designer baby" argument as that is a knee jerk response and not really thinking about the costs that limit people who could even go this route. Not to mention that IVF docs are more interested in health and prevention of deadly disease and don't even do research on eye color selection and other such minor details.

Wasalaam

 

[Aapa]

Salaam,

First thank you for the clarification Sister Shyhijab. There is a minority of people both patients and doctors who will do anything. Ethics is a word not in their vocabulary. However, that minority is small.
In the old days women would check the vaginal area to see if it was more of an acid or more a base. If it was a base they would have intercourse; it was thought this would yield a male; acid a female.
I was just glad I conceived. ( After my sons wrecked my car..I am wondering )

 

[al-muslimah]

Salam alaycoum everyone..sorry for my late replay as im really busy with my studies and exams( need your duaas)...jazakallah khayran Hard rock muslem and asivhora for spending time to reply..also jazaki allahu khayran sister soeurette for your interesting point. Sister shyhijabi mashallah thankyou for making it so easy to understand the types of gender pre selection as i couldnt understand it on differant websites..jazakalla khayran sister mirajmom for spending time to look through my thread..

Alhamdulilah im so far so good in this topic..i found many things as cons and pros..but i would love to read more..so please if you guys have more clear info..please do share

where can i find the history of gender preselection? like i want to know where it exactly came from and who invented it?

 

[soeurette]

Salam,

Sister Shyhijabi while I can understand your annoyance at the fact that people have the knee jerk reaction of designer babies, but from my research for my bioinformatics course it isn't the majority that I worry about but the minority. There are people out there that are going to use this kind of technology to indeed create designer babies, and who knows what else. Call me a conspiracy theorist, paranoid, whatever, but there are going to be those scientists and doctors out there who aren't necessarily looking at the ramifications of what they are doing but rather the profits they are bringing in.
I just feel that there should be limits to the kinds of procedures that we allow doctors and scientists to perform. Its kind of a double edged sword for me, my degree is in Biology, and I love Genetics I think genetics research is absolutely fascinating, but I do have profound issues with the tampering around with the genome, I think that sometimes researchers can be a bit over zealous about interesting (and yes sometimes useful) research and they want to push it to the limits when sometimes maybe that isn't such a good idea.
sister al-muslimah, pubmed is a pretty good website and scholargoogle too to find journal articles and research articles about the subject, sometimes you aren't going to get access to an article but you can find some interesting papers.