In this week s episode of ER , a woman who finds out she is pregnant with a girl indicates she is going to end her pregnancy because she would prefer to have a boy.
Experts say gender selection is an exceedingly rare reason for a woman to end a pregnancy.
According to Edward E. Wallach, MD, J. Donald Woodruff Professor of Gynecology, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, people have been trying select the gender of their offspring for thousands of years. Dr. Wallach says that when it comes to sex selection, there are no guarantees. The authors site hemophilia as an example of this type of birth defect. According to Dr. Wallach, the desire to balance gender within families dates back at least to the ancient Greeks. When a specific gender was demanded, the testicle that produced the opposite gender sperm was removed surgically.