I’m not asking for any medical advice, you are not my doctor, I am not your patient, yadda yadda yadda.
Being able to choose the gender of your child using In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) has been around since 1990. I don’t know anyone who has ever done it for that reason, but I know it’s been done to preclude passing along certain genetic variants. For example, I have the ABCD1 gene variant for Adrenoleukodystrophy (ALD), which is on my X chromosome. Assuming my wife doesn’t have the variant, which is extremely unlikely and easy to test for, there is no way I can pass it onto my son, however, it’s guaranteed to be passed to my daughter, which actually happened because I didn’t know at the time I had the variant!
Here’s the hypothetical. Let’s say John and Jane Doe have been fruitful and multiplied. They have three healthy children, all girls, but they had been hoping for a boy in order to pass along the treasured “Doe” surname for another generation (John has no brothers or male cousins). Since there is nothing they can do to reliably impact the gender of their child, and since they are financially comfortable, they decide to have gender-selective IVF and have found someone that will do it and guarantee their fourth child is a boy. They realize having the IVF procedure involves risks, and that there’s no guarantee of a successful pregnancy or birth. Even knowing that they decide to go through with it anyway.
Do you think there is anything wrong with doing this? Is there anything unethical about a doctor performing this procedure? There is no valid medical reason they need to have a boy… they just want one. Your thoughts?
I don’t think it is wrong or unethical, but I think society is better off having a strict “No gender selection IVF except for XY individuals passing on a bad X” law, than one carving out a bunch of additional exceptions, or not having one at all.
I tend to agree that gender-selection IVF “just because you prefer a boy” or “just to keep the surname in the family” could go down some dark places. People in most countries will use it to select boys, whom are considered more useful to the family. Just look how the one-child policy in China turned out.
Let just stick with the United States for now. I don’t want to presume to know what would or wouldn’t happen in China, India, or anywhere else since they all have very different cultures. I also doubt many people could afford to have it done, assuming it was as expensive there as in the US.
Here’s my take. If a couple wants to end up with an all boys or all girls basketball team, and has the small fortune it would take to pull it off, what harm does it do me or society in general? Why should I care why someone wants to have one gender or another? And why should government say you can’t pick the gender of your child? That seems like a personal question that the government should not have a say in.
Ugh, I can definitely see a problem with deliberately having quintuplets all of the same sex, or five children in rapid enough succession that they can all play on the same basketball team together. What if one of them rebels and decides he’d rather sing in the choir?
And then, even in the United States, we get into religious discussions about gender determination, I reckon. It’s bad enough in normal situations that we have transphobes talking about “If you were really a boy, you would have been born a boy.”
I can understand the “slippery slope” argument with someone saying it will invariably lead to eugenics, but outlawing it completely, or only allowing it in certain situations, seems capricious and arbitrary.
It’s possible to do this today. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle, and doing it to maintain a surname that would otherwise die out is not a bad reason.
I don’t really see how religion plays into it. If your religion forbids you from doing it, and you are a faithful adherent of your religion’s rules, then I guess you’re out-of-luck, unless you do the procedure and keep it a secret from everyone (disobey your religion).
I think it’s a ridiculous reason. But I don’t see it as unethical.
I have a hard time relating to such an attachment to one’s surname. A rose by any other name, and all that.
Also, these days women are keeping their own names, even after marrying. (good, in my opinion). The surname can live on through their daughters.
So, to the origional question. Nothing immoral or unethical about it on the micro level, but I’m having a hard time condoning it because I don’t get the motivation, at all.
First, I’ll state that the scenario in this hypothetical has already veered into unethical territory IMHO when the parents decided to have more children than the “replacement” number of 2.
However, even forgetting that part, yes, I think actively selecting for gender is unethical. There is no way a population that gets to make that choice on a large scale doesn’t start to succumb to cultural biases and start selecting towards one gender or another.
Speaking of ethics, do the same ethics apply to sperm spinning as selecting the sex of an embryo to implant?
With sperm spinning they separate the X and Y sperm by either weight or speed, which gives you pretty high odds, 70 to 85%, that a baby conceived by either insemination or IVF is going to be of the selected gender.
I’m very prolife, and I find it less problematic than I do someone creating a whole bunch of embryos the traditional way knowing they’ll never use half-ish of them if they only want a boy or only a girl. The fact that one gender isn’t going to “get a chance” to be even an embryo bothers me not at all, though.
Do folks who are against sex selection for non-disease avoidance reasons feel different about this or is it the same level of bad?
The question of “is it unethical” depends on the question “according to what ethics?” If it were the case that family composition has no impact on anyone outside your family, then go ahead, practice household eugenics with your own progeny. Select for sex, select for height, select for eye color. Use IVF, or adoption, or abortion. If there’s no consequence to society, and you’re not harming already-born humans, then I truly wouldn’t care.
Except… we know that’s not the case. Sex selection does have consequences outside the family, serious consequences to society. Look at China and India where a bad situation has been caused through a combination of family-limiting policy along with freely available abortion. They’re facing a demographic crisis of a population dramatically skewed toward boys. When these boys were younger they suffered from a “little prince” syndrome, but in adulthood there’s now a problem with “princess syndrome” now that the princes are old enough to need partners that are in very short supply.
I would prefer to see government establish a birth quota for sexes by region. The consequence would be outlawing of any sex-selective assisted-reproductive therapy in regions that have excessive gender skew. Except in cases like yours, where there is a documented medical necessity for selecting against genes that happen to reside on the sex chromosomes.
The ethical question would then become “are you following the law or not”, which is easier to resolve.
Well, an alternative would be to determine sec of the fetus as early as possible and abort if it isn’t what the parents want. That would be legal, right?
Hmm. I didn’t immediately catch on to why this would be unethical. Reading the replies, it seems that it’s because of knock-on effects. However, it seems to me that those effects exist because the technology exists, and that the couple’s use of it does not affect this.
You could, I guess, make a policy argument that it should not be allowed, lest people engage in eugenics. But I do not think what is being described here fits. And I’m not sure that such a policy would help unless you could get the whole world to sign off on it, limiting this sort of thing to certain uses.
And, no, I can’t see how this would be eugenics. Yes, there is a desirable trait being selected for, but eugenics is about trying to snuff out the “inferior” population with genetic “superiors.” That’s why, say, using it to prevent some sort of disease isn’t seen as eugenics, even though it’s still selecting for a desirable trait.
At least, that’s MHO about this at the moment. I welcome people explaining how I’m wrong, or even just disagreeing.
When I was a kid, the family in the house behind us had seven girls. They just kept popping out babies, trying for a boy to carry on the family name. I don’t know what happened after we moved; for all I know, 65 years later, there are hundreds of girls in that little yellow house.
If that family had access to IVF, it would have made their lives much easier. OTOH, there’s still no guarantee a boy would carry on the family name. Neither my brother nor I ever had kids, and really, who cares?
Using IVF to prevent disease is absolutely eugenics. Fundamentally it is about reducing the frequency of bad genes in the population and increasing the frequency of good ones, and IVF can do this either quickly or slowly, depending if asymptomatic carriers are also selected against. (By contrast, the method used in Israel of testing the population for recessive mutations and avoiding marriages between people who carry the same ones prevents the birth of people suffering from genetic diseases, but doesn’t reduce the frequency of the mutations that cause them.)
There’s two issues with eugenics: one is whether it’s good or bad in itself, the other is whether the methods used to achieve it are ethical. There’s obviously a huge difference between governments sterilising people involuntarily and parents choosing to use IVF to ensure they have a healthy baby.
But sex selection in itself cannot be eugenic; since currently we always need one male and one female in order to reproduce, it can have no lasting effect on numbers in the population. If increases in technology ever allow for reproduction with only one sex, then this could change.