IntelliGender release raises abortion fears
By Courier Mail,
Courier Mail
| 05. 10. 2009
A test that claims to determine the sex of an unborn baby only eight weeks into a pregnancy will be available in pharmacies from today.
IntelliGender, the first test of its kind in Australia, claims a 90 per cent accuracy rate in determining whether a baby will be a boy or a girl.
Doctors and the anti-abortion lobby, however, fear the test will be used as a means of sex selection and drive up abortion rates.
The company behind the $95 test, which has been sold in the US since 2006, says it takes 10 minutes and identifies a "confidential element" found in the hormones of a woman pregnant with a girl.
The element is found in very low levels in women pregnant with a boy or not pregnant at all.
Currently, women who want to find out their baby's gender can do so at a routine 18- to 20-week ultrasound to check on the health and development of the child.
Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists president Dr Ted Weaver said there appeared to be...
Related Articles
By Alex Polyakov, The Conversation | 02.09.2026
Prospective parents are being marketed genetic tests that claim to predict which IVF embryo will grow into the tallest, smartest or healthiest child.
But these tests cannot deliver what they promise. The benefits are likely minimal, while the risks to...
By Steve Rose, The Guardian | 01.28.2026
Ed Zitron, EZPR.com; Experience Summit stage;
Web Summit 2024 via Wikipedia Commons licensed under CC by 2.0
If some time in an entirely possible future they come to make a movie about “how the AI bubble burst”, Ed Zitron will...
By Arthur Lazarus, MedPage Today | 01.23.2026
A growing body of contemporary research and reporting exposes how old ideas can find new life when repurposed within modern systems of medicine, technology, and public policy. Over the last decade, several trends have converged:
- The rise of polygenic scoring...
By Daphne O. Martschenko and Julia E. H. Brown, Hastings Bioethics Forum | 01.14.2026
There is growing concern that falling fertility rates will lead to economic and demographic catastrophe. The social and political movement known as pronatalism looks to combat depopulation by encouraging people to have as many children as possible. But not just...
