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The ethics committee of the nation's fertility society has revised a controversial opinion on sex selection that some of its members offered in September. In its new, more restrictive, opinion, the committee says that couples should be discouraged from creating embryos, selecting some and discarding others, solely because they have a child of one sex and want one of another.

A chain of fertility centers in New York and Chicago that had been advertising and offering the sex selection service, the Center for Human Reproduction, said it would immediately abide by the decision.

The fertility society, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, establishes positions on ethical issues, and most fertility clinics say they adhere to them.

The sex selection question arose last year when Dr. Norbert Gleicher, chairman of the Center for Human Reproduction, wrote to the fertility society and asked for a ruling on the practice. Dr. Gleicher argued that the society had already said it was acceptable to use a new sorting technique to separate sperm that would produce a boy from those that would produce a girl...