Islamic Center of Southern California

The Arguments of Islamic Law Rulings on Recent Medical Issues

Topic Two

Controlling the Gender of a Human Embryo 57

Sex Selection

Definition

Control of the sex of a human embryo is done through one of two procedures.

The first is that, at the request of a married couple, a physician extracts, with a needle, some of the liquid surrounding the embryo in the uterus to determine its sex. If it is not the desired sex, the pregnant woman asks for abortion. This procedure is repeated until a pregnancy with an embryo of the desired sex occurs.

In the second procedure, a physician, at the request of a married couple, stimulates male sperms in order for the embryo to be male, or female sperms to have a female embryo. 58

The Legal Position Chosen by the IOMS and Its Argument

The IOMS refrained from taking a definite position on the question of fetal gender, addressed in the Seminar on Human Reproduction, and merely surveyed some points of view offered by scholars. The recommendations of the seminar, however, include the following:

There was an agreement that the Islamic legal viewpoint is that fetal sex selection is unlawful when practiced at a national level.

On an individual level, however, some of the scholars participating in the Seminar believe there is nothing legally wrong with the attempt to fulfill the wish of a married couple to have a boy or a girl through available medical means, while other scholars believe it is unlawful, for fear that one sex might outnumber the other.

57 The Islamic Organization of Medical Sciences (IOMS) discussed this question in its first seminar, the Seminar on Reproduction in Islam, on May 26, 1983.

58 Dr. Hassan Hathout, "Fetal Sex-Selection ," The Seminar on Human Reproduction, p. 37. Islamic Center of Southern California