This is extremely controversial

May 5, 2007 10:08 GMT  ·  By

Craving for knowing the sex of your unborn child? Well, normally you have to wait 5 months till modern scanning could tell you. But new special British DNA testing kits, available on the Internet, can tell you the sex of your baby at just 6 weeks of pregnancy (one month and a half)!

Many women are not even aware of being pregnant at such an early date...

The kit, traded by DNA Worldwide, costs ?189 ($377, 280 Euro) and can be sent through the post complete with a prepaid return envelope.

A woman can send her sample directly to the company's laboratories for the interpretation and the results will be sent back by post or put online using a protected password in a maximum of six business days. The technique detects DNA molecules from the baby in the mother's blood: if there is a Y-chromosome, found only in males, there's for sure a baby boy.

The lack of the Y-chromosome signals "with equal confidence" that the baby is a girl. For this, all that it takes is a prick of blood from the mother. The "express" version, in just four business days, costs ?239, 95.

"Since an ultrasound is not always accurate in determining the gender of a baby, and is most commonly performed four to six months during the pregnancy to determine the gender, the Early Gender Test is the best solution to determining the sex of an unborn child." claims the company.

The company claims the test is 99% accurate and offers a refund for wrong predictions. Of course, this would be good news for couples at risk of delivering sex-related genetic diseased babies, like Duchene muscular dystrophy or haemophilia in boys. But critics fear sex-related abortions if parents are unhappy with the test result.

"There is a real risk that some people would choose to abort babies of a certain gender." said Julia Millington of the Prolife Alliance.

"This test is very dangerous. It would inevitably lead to babies being aborted simply for not being the 'required' sex." said Michaela Aston of the pro-life charity LIFE.

In some countries the gendercide of the female embryos have reached hallucinating rates: in southern Chinese provinces, the sex ration at birth is already 135 boys: 100 girls (the normal worldwide is 100:100) and in India is 118: 100 in some areas. The Chinese consider that only males can do the funerary rites of the deceased parents and ancestors (the same occurs in Taiwan and Korea) while Indians avoid paying huge dowries for girls' weddings.