Organization Promoting Sex Selection Lies Its Way to UN Accreditation

By Rebecca Oas, Ph.D. | 2014

NEW YORK, January 31 (C-FAM) The head of a fertility clinic that performs highly controversial and sometimes-deadly sex selection services downplayed those services during testimony before a UN committee this week. He also led governments to believe his group works on issues for which there is no record of previous activity.

Dr. Masood Khatamee also claims to be “White House and Congressional Physician of the Year” though it appears the claims are highly dubious. The Congressional Physician of the Year was given to doctors who made financial contributions to the Republican National Committee and the Friday Fax could find no evidence there is anything called the “White House Physician of the Year.”

Dr. Khatamee told the UN committee in charge of approving groups for official UN recognition about the harmful effects of female genital mutilation and expressed his interest in consulting with the international community, “so that we can hopefully in the long term reduce this inhumane act on women.” However, neither his statement nor the website of his organization, the New York Fertility Research Foundation, offered an example of any experience or accomplishments in this area.

The committee reviewing organizations for accreditation was more concerned with services advertised by the foundation, including in vitro fertilization (IVF) and “gender pre-selection,” by which a couple can choose to implant only embryos of their desired sex. The delegates from India and Pakistan sought further information on these topics. Dr. Khatamee finally admitted that his organization offered sex selection after being directly asked three times, including a previously-submitted written question.

Hearing this, the Pakistani delegate asked what happened to the embryos not chosen for implantation. Dr. Khatamee replied that if the embryo was deemed “defective,” it was given to stem cell research. If the embryos are female but the parents wanted sons, he said, “we give them to someone – we donate them to somebody who wants an embryo. That’s it.”

Embryo adoption or donation is not listed among the organization’s services.

Dr. Khatamee insisted that the Fertility Research Foundation was committed to maintaining a balanced sex ratio, citing India as an example of imbalance. His organization generated controversy in 2001 when the New York Times reported that they were advertising their services to Indian expatriates in the US and Canada, using the line,

“Desire a son?” and “Choosing the sex of your baby: new scientific reality.”

The chairman of the English-language newspaper India Abroad subsequently stopped running the ads: “We don’t want to be remotely associated with anybody that discriminates for a boy child over a girl child.”

Under questioning from the Pakistani delegate, Dr. Khatamee claimed that he understood all the religious perspectives and insisted, “ethically there is nothing wrong with what we do – this is a technology.”

The availability of prenatal ultrasounds in China and India has enabled the widespread selective abortion of daughters, leading to highly skewed gender ratios. The UN has declined to take a strong position against sex-selective abortion.

According to Unnatural Selection author Mara Hvistendahl, “Western government actively promoted abortion and sex selection in the developing world, encouraging the liberalization of abortion laws and subsidizing sales of ultrasounds as a form of population control.”

When the Israeli delegate asked Dr. Khatamee about his foundation’s international work, he said that they had IVF centers in Tehran and Dubai, adding that, “the cost is less and a lot of people from the United States go there to do the IVF.”

Apart from his putative assistance on the issue of female genital mutilation, Dr. Khatamee did not offer any further insights into how his organization might contribute to the UN system.

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