APPENDIX 49
Memorandum from Alan Masterton and Louise
Masterton
GENDER SELECTION:
AND WHY
IT IS
RIGHT FOR
OUR FAMILY
Eighteen years ago my wife Louise and I were
blessed and ecstatic at the arrival of our first son, we didn't
care if he was a boy or a girl we just wanted him or her to be
healthy; Our second son arrived some three years later and in
our naivety we thought fine! we will have our girl now and our
family will be complete, I cannot recall a single point in time
when we sat down and made a conscious decision about trying for
a girl, it was something that simply came upon us and felt as
natural and normal as breathing, a further two sons arrived sometime
later and although things get a little fractious at times we do
of course love them all to bits.
We thought that every time we tried to conceive
we had a 50/50 chance of either gender we later discovered however
that this in reality is simply not the case, gender of the embryo
is decided by the sperm and the man who has the 50/50 sperm mix
is the exception not the rule, the vast majority of us have a
bias towards one or the other gender, my own being 90% male.
In 1994 we decided to try one last time to have
our girl and on 5 December 1995 our princess arrived, in a hurry
as would be her way, she was beautiful perfect and ours! Our family
complete Louise was sterilised in 1996 and I sold off my business
to return to university so as I could eventually spend more time
with my kids, that was the plan, the plan was going fine until
22 of May 1999 when we were burning some leaves and debris in
the garden of our home, Nicole appeared from nowhere and was caught
by a lick of flame from the fire, the flame had changed direction
for a nano-second in the wind, the fire caught her clothing and
she suffered 85% third degree burns in a flash, we got her into
a bath of freezing water almost instantly but the damage had been
done in that one fatal spark of time, our precious angel lost
her fight for life after 61 days and over 100 hours of torturous
surgery at the Sick Kids Hospital in Edinburgh, she was aged three
years and seven months, we miss her every hour of every day.
Those who say that we are trying to replace
Nicole talk from a position of ignorance. We do undeniably want
to replace the female dimension to our family that Nicole brought,
that difference that a female child makes to a house of male children,
We are not stupid people. We are well aware that all humans are
individuals in their own right and Nicole was an exceptional character,
to give up on this quest to help in some small way to heal her
loss, to give other families such as us hope, would we think be
letting her down.
To the critics who say we need to deal with
our grief we would ask them to go talk to our clinical physiologists
and our own GP who has known us for many years, most "professionals"
who meet us agree that we have dealt admirably with our loss and
the advent of another female child in our home would be both positive
and healthy, and that child would undoubtedly be much wanted and
loved.
We made an application to the HFEA to have the
rule governing gender selection "modified" so that cases
such as ours could be considered, we submitted 21 copies of an
application I had worked on for three months to be heard before
the 21 person lay-committee of the HFEA, on the day the decision
was made the chairperson of the HFEA took one copy in to the meeting
and decided to "extract the relevant points from the application,"
two years later we await advice of the points that were "raised."
And so there was a Parliamentary Ombudsman investigation into
the conduct of the HFEA and after another year the Ombudsman decided
we had been mislead by the Authority, we received an apology from
the HFEA but no mention of revisiting our case and so this is
why we soldier on with this campaign.
Much trash is written about this issue and it
has to be said that much of what is written is penned by people
who know little at best on the subject. If a woman's magazine
said that eating a kilo of broccoli a day for a month would guarantee
a boy (or a girl) thousands would do it, broccoli sales would
rocket, it would not be outlawed and the world would not change!
The arguments against gender selection mirror the old arguments
about IVF; they are spurious and have no basis in fact. I am a
pragmatist and view most things in the context of harm, or indeed
least-harm, gender selection inflicts no harm to child, family
or society and indeed natures own "lottery" creates
untold misery and suffering.
We have had gender selection available in this
country for the past ten years in the form of unlicensed sperm
selection, no cataclysmic demographic changes have occurred, we
have not produced a race of perfect praetorian guards and there
are no armies of bronzed blue-eyed seven foot Adonis. Such propositions
are mere volksgeist; ghosts conjured up for the purposes of stirring
the masses against the issue of gender selection, selling copy
and stifling debate on the issue.
The reality is that the so-called "designer
baby" is many years off, the very best scientists in the
field acknowledge that it will be for generations in the future
to decide—none of us will live to see that day, and the
HFEA are well aware of this fact but continue to insult us all
with frequent delinquent use of the adjective "designer."
The "slippery slope" or "floodgate"
theory has also been used. But in the intervening twenty years
since the birth of the first test tube baby Louise Brown we have
had no floods of children being born through IVF, or clones, or
masses of deformed children.
It is a fact often deliberately overlooked but
none the less valid that every single child born of an IVF procedure
is a much wanted and loved child, to be clear that is seventy
thousand or so children born to IVF patients in the last twenty
three years loved and wanted, I ask this question, if you could
select any seventy thousand children born "naturally"
from the remaining population that has not been assisted by the
use of IVF treatment could you honestly say that 100% of those
children were conceived through love? Or wanted? Sadly, the answer
is a resounding no!
June 2004
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