Baby Gender Selection - Unethical

From The guardian

Anyone think there is an ethical issue here? I don’t see any. But I do see where governments might outlaw it in the larger interests of society, if there was a danger that the technique could become widespread enough to produce an imbalance. But that’s a long way off.

I agree that this doesn’t seem like much of an issue. The idea that this would foster a “one sex is better than the other” mentality is stretching it a bit, I think, as the industrialized world has gone to great lengths (well, not great but has done a lot) to ensure that that particular stereotype has been cut off. From a not-so-random sampling of the people I know and have known, there is a preference for child’s gender, but there isn’t a strong leaning in one over the other.

Having a child is like a DNA lottery. How fixing the odds would result in some unethical situation(in this instance) is beyond me. I would think that subjecting a new life to such a lottery when control is possible is downright unethical in itself! (not that sex matters, I am referring to other things)

The main question: if sex doesn’t matter, why the furor over choosing it? If sex does matter and we should prohibit choosing, then why all the laws and ideas promoting equality of the sexes? There’s a schism here somewhere that I don’t understand.

My husband suffers from an inherited sex-linked disorder, and near as I can tell, gender selection would be the only ethical way for us to have kids. I hope that in five years or so this technique is common and cheap over here.

I also can’t get my knickers in a wad over people wanting to select the sex of thier offspring as long as we are not talking about selective abortions. I can see that if you had two children of one gender, you might very well have a definite preference for a child of the other gender, and I don’t see anything wrong with that. I do suspect that if gender selection became routine we would see mostly older brother-younger sister families. This seems to be something of an ideal. Seeing as that would keep the gender ratios stable, I don’t see any worries. Furthermore, this technology will be so great for couples like my husband and me, and I don’t see any way to have it avalible for people wiht genetic disorders and not have it avalible for people without.

Well, I can see that some of the reasons that parents might select one gender or another might be ethically questionable, but I have no ethical qualms about providing them the ability to make a choice.

Next comes the ability to choose which gender the baby will be later on in life:)

Assuming we never go China’s route, and keep everybody to one kid, we’ll probably be alright. (China is experiencing some severe female-shortages. All those wonderful boys now want wives to make more boys with. GOTCHA!)

Manda Jo… I think you are right about the older brother/younger sister family structure. And if one believes at all in birth order dynamics, I think that might kinda suck. Dooming most girls to be #2. Hmm

stoid

that should read: "birth order dynamics ** and how they affect personality **

Thank you

Does that include contraception? The Rhythm Method? Stopping to answer the phone? Changing positions a lot? Oral sex?

Hate to throw the baby out with the bath water (with which this person would also probably object), but I tend to take the opinions of people with such sweeeping opinions with a grain of salt.

Good point, Stoid, but look on the bright side. The 1-child policy was an effort to hold down the population. The fact that boys get chosen disproportionately enhances the effectiveness of the program.

More importantly, does that include refusing to have sex with me? :slight_smile:

I took the statement that “Any kind of interference with the process of conception is wrong” as hyperbole, but was taken with the article’s summary that

which seems to imply that there is some harm being done to a purely theoretical person who does not, and will never, exist.

The point that Stoid brings up is an interesting one. Suppose it were true that selecting baby’s gender will produce a world in which most women were lesser personalities than most men (or vice versa). Is there some kind of ethical issue involved? From the perspective of each individual woman, it’s hard to say where she was harmed - she would either be born or not. Is it possible to say that harm is being done to an intangible being as “womanhood”?. Or perhaps the issue is that because there would be a legitimate stereotype about women, those women who don’t fit the stereotype will suffer unfairly, by being typecast as fitting the mold.

Anyone think there is an ethical issue here? I don’t see any. But I do see where governments might outlaw it in the larger interests of society, if there was a danger that the technique could become widespread enough to produce an imbalance. But that’s a long way off. **
[/QUOTE]

If it is my body then I’m free to do what I want with it. Abort it, figure out what sex it will be, or make sure it had blue eyes.

Marc

Actually, the first-born of either gender, or a child born after a significant age gap, tend to exhibit first-born traits. So as long as a girl was a first-born girl, she’ll likely exhibit the aggression, ambition, and high expectations of a first-born. Neither my brother nor I ever accepted being #2.

I wonder why everyone assumes you’d want a first-born boy. I always wanted the girl first, then they boy, so they’d be closer to the same weight class. I doubt my brother would have held me down and drooled on me if I had been strong enough for it to be a fair fight. :wink:

Is there actually any strong evidence for this, or is it another pop-culture, sells-books, psycho-babble, why-should-astrologists-get-to-fleece-all-the-suckers, psychiatrists are from Pluto but talk from Uranus kind of thing?

I know that this particular second-son was far more aggressive than his older brother. Better looking, too [sub](Well, at least until the scars started piling up.)[/sub]

I’d have to look up the books to see what studies were cited (it’s been at least 5 years, too, so my info might be out of date), but while birth order was popular for a while and suffered from scads of quickly-produced fluff books, I do recall there being something to back it up. I’d rank it at about the level of studies of gender differences in communication; there is solid research out there, and reputable writers make it clear that they are only talking about generalities and just one small aspect of the influences on a person’s personality and interactions, but they get drowned out by cheerful, dumbed-down anecdotal pap like the Mars/Venus books. So learning that you were more aggresive than your sib does not surprise me, but I do think that the parent is often more demanding towards first-borns and this can help mold their personality in certain directions. And the youngest child is often babied, and the middle child is often a peacemaker, etc. I can see if I can dig something up on the net, but given that it was so popular for a while, there’s probably a lot of crap to wade through.

Gaudere, the reason I hypothosize (and that is obviously all I am doing) that one would see alot of big-bro/little sister combinations is that I do think that alot of people wihtout children idealize that particular reationship more than the other way around. The big brother protects hte little sister, and brings home friends, one of whom she falls in love with and marries. He teaches her to be a tomboy, but not too much of one. On the other hand, big sisters are bossy and into gross stuff like make-up and hog the phone all the time . . .

I think that it is just a natural outgrowth of our assumption that in any male-female partnership, the male ought to be the dominiant one. Not really pretty, but there.

Hmmm…most of the firstborns(like myself) that I know are female. I wonder if there are statistics on this sort of thing? IMHO, being a big sister of a little brother is actually ideal. We are closer than most other siblings- except maybe my friend Kristia and her little brother, who are equally close :slight_smile: In both cases there is a big age gap between the siblings ages (6+ years for Vince and I, 4+ years for Kristia and her brother) the downside, though, as mentioned is none of his friends are interesting to me.

People have been doing things for a long time to help “determine” if they’ll have a a boy or girl, none of them are scientific, and they have varying results. Is that unethical too, or only when there’s a higher sucess rate? My mother swears by a method that is supposed to change a woman’s PH to concieve a boy or girl. It “worked” both times, as she and my dad got first the girl, then the boy they wanted.

When people who adopt choose gender (as I had the opportunity to do) they overwhelmingly choose girls.

There is a lot of speculation on why this happens, including that alot of adoption is interracial and girls are seen as less “other” than boys of a different race. Boys are often seen as more problematic to raise. And there is the thought that the person who often instigates the decision to have children is the woman, who would prefer a little girl.

Don’t know that it would hold true for bios, but don’t know that at least some of the factors wouldn’t.

< just a rant>
December, “the fact that boys get chosen disproportionately” in China is not really a problem, the fact that they are “chosen” by leaving unwanted female children to die in the street or in orphanages is.
<rant over>

Centrifuging spunk ,which is all this technique is, for the purposes of sex-determination is much less unethical than aborting an unwanted foetus. Unwanted, that is, because of it’s gender. All science is doing is removing a BIT more of the uncertainty.

I don’t have a problem with people wanting to have eg a girl in order to avoid haemophilia or DMD, but when you say “I’ll have a boy, and then a girl, and then twin girls, non-identical, etc” it all gets a bit selfish and warped.

Children are not for the purpose of accessorising a lifestyle, they are not the property of their parents (not that i’m not pro-choice)and it is wrong to treat them as such. Nor is it ethical to allow STEREOTYPED and OUTDATED preconceptions of gender to determine medical practice.

I mean, imagine this conversation.

“Mummy and Daddy love you very much, and we decided you would be a boy, if on the off-chance the technology didn’t work and you were a girl, we would have aborted you and tried again”

Re-inforces that message of unconditional parental love, doesn’t it.
:frowning:

This is supposed to be the one certainty in life, that no matter what you do, or who you are, or what you look like your mother still loves you.
Doesn’t always work out like that…but still, it’s an ideal that should be preserved.
I should be able to accept that my son is gay, or a criminal, or an addict, or heaven help me, a lawyer
:slight_smile:

But I’m supposed to find it unacceptable that my son is a girl?

Yeahbut…ig (hmm, not a very nice abbreviation, I will stop using it if you tell me to), I think this kind of has a bearing on the whole choice/actual-child-vs.-potential-child debate. You do feel differently about, and have different responsibilities toward, a baby who isn’t yet born or maybe even conceived than a baby who is right there, in the flesh, his/her own unique self. I know women who got pregnant unexpectedly who seriously considered aborting; their children are now their pride and delight, natch, but they don’t feel guilty about having once not been sure whether they wanted them. Many parents dearly love their handicapped children just as they are, but it doesn’t mean that if they’d had the choice during pregnancy, they might not have preferred to have a different child without the handicap.

Similarly, wanting to have a son is not the same thing as not loving a daughter (though I admit in extreme cases, one can lead to the other). I agree that the whole “designer-kid” idea does have a rather shallow and unrealistic feel to it: after all, any kid is going to be largely unexpected and unpredictable, so parents who set their hearts on choosing the kid they want instead of learning to accept whatever they get do seem a little bit unclear on the concept. But I still think there’s a big difference between being fussy about the specs when your kid is still just a gleam in the lab technician’s eye and being similarly picky when he/she is actually here.

(Technical question hijack: don’t the sperm get really dizzy when you centrifuge them? :))