A blood test in use in Britain to check for genetic abnormalities in foetuses could be resulting in sex-selective abortions, a government report has warned.

According to The Daily Telegraph, government concerns were raised following a review by the Department of Health into the use of Non Invasive Pre-natal Testing (NIPT), which, among other things, can determine the gender of a foetus from as early as seven weeks of pregnancy.

Together with advances in ultra-sound scanning technology, NIPT can be misused by those seeking to give birth to sons instead of daughters, a bias displayed by some migrant groups from countries where sex-selective abortion is widely practised.

The Department of Health’s review states that NPIT “underlines the need for us to continue to monitor birth ratios and abortions by ethnicity to assess the impact of these tests, particularly if they become more widely available”.

Sex-selective abortion is considered a phenomenon now in Britain, a view supported by The Daily Telegraph’s undercover investigations and secret filming of doctors allegedly agreeing to conduct such terminations. One of the subjects of the newspaper’s probe, Dr Palaniappan Rajmohan, a physician in Birmingham, was recently suspended for three months following revelations that he was offering to abort female infants and had lied to The Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service over the grounds for the abortions.

In February of this year, MPs rejected a call to make sex-selective abortions illegal by amendment to current legislation.