Per this this article it looks like homosexuality is (surprisingly) not primarily genetic, but is most likely to be hormonally mediated by the neonatal environment of the unborn child.
If this is the case and most parents don’t want a gay child (and per the article they don’t) if the opportunity is afforded to control in utero hormones that will effectively mean the removal in our society of the vast majority of homosexually oriented people.
Should stopping a turn to “gayness” in utero be made illegal?
Being left-handed is abnormal in the statistical sense, yet we don’t intervene in the womb to change that, do we?
It is still the case that the major burden of homosexuality is societal attitudes and not the choice of sexual partner. These days, it need not interfere with reproduction, so even that objection falls by the wayside.
What are the risks/benefits to this sort of pre-birth manipulation?
There will still be gay people - people who slip through pre-natal testing, people born to parents who don’t think it’s a big deal, maybe even people born to homosexual parents who want homosexual children. Ironically, people born to groups like Catholics who forbid interference with human reproduction.
It might reduce the number of homosexuals… or it may, in the end, make no significant difference.
I would look at it like a lot of other similar issues: is it right to selectively abort babies based on their presumed “problems” after birth? Right now, ~90% of Down’s Syndrome babies are aborted before they’re born. I see this as a huge problem. I would say the same about babies who may turn out to be homosexual. And just about anything else. I simply don’t think it’s right to abort a child based on one’s own opinion about how acceptable the child is going to be.
Just to be clear, I don’t think the OP is talking about aborting gay fetuses, but rather regulating the uterine environment so that a fetus doesn’t become gay.
Personally I don’t have a problem with this, even if homosexuality proves to be 100% due to these hormonal factors and medical procedures are created to give perfect control over those factors (big ifs, IMHO), I imagine their will still be gay people, for the reasons broomstick points out.
And in some parts of the world, sonograms and selective abortions ensure that parents can get a son and not an inconvenient daughter. We don’t hear the pro-choice lobby talk much about this, either.
Personally, I don’t think changing the law can do much in cases like this - only a change in the morality, the attitudes, and sometimes the economic standing of the parents involved may make a difference.
Certainly I see abortion as generally wrong, and abortions for these reasons certainly so, but such won’t matter unless others are convinced of the same.
:dubious: It says this was tried with sheep, and failed. Looks like it will be a good long while before it becomes a concern with humans.
I’m also dubious about how this is supposed to work – if you get tested and find that mommy’s hormones have made your sprog gay, surely you are then beyond the point where you can muck around with mommy’s hormones so that the sprog doesn’t turn gay. Which means you’d have to medicate her hormones before knowing which way the sprog will go – and there’s another study required, to find out how this hormone adjustment will affect some kid who wouldn’t have grown up gay.
I’d like to see the ethics committee for that study.
Anyway, back to the sheep, it seems the only thing they’ve attempted is to influence sheep becoming gay. Maybe the question to be asked is whether causing a turn to gayness in utero should be illegal?
Do you support abortion in other cases, such as when the parents are unable to offer the child the care it needs? If so, what if the parents are able to provide adequate care to a regular child but are unable to meet the tremendous additional time and monetary demands necessary for raising a child with Down’s Syndrome? If not, how is your position any different from the standard pro-life stance?
What’s wrong with aborting a fetus that would have Downs? That’s totally what I would want to do.
The OP isn’t about abortion, though, it’s about using in vitro hormonal treatments to insure a heterosexual orientation. I have no problem with that either, not because I think there’s anything wrong with having a gay kid, but because it doesn’t harm anybody, and I think whatever doesn’t harm anybody should be legal.
I’m generally surprisingly comfortable with in utero interference, but my impression is that this is so far off (any prenatal hormonal cocktail administered in utero would require at least, I believe, 8 years of clinical trials even after the basic research is sufficiently sound, which it is not) as to not really be worth getting as freaked out as the author of this piece.
Furthermore, if you read the cited PNAS article, it has nothing to do with hormonal anything and discusses only sexual dimorphism in the amygdala, and I mean, yeah I guess it’s cool that the asymmetry and connectivity of homosexual men is female-like and the asymmetry and connectivity of homosexual women is male-like*, but yeah. So what?
We should definitely start thinking of the ethical ramifications of such a procedure however. Just not in a panicked “OMG WE’RE GOING TO LOSE GAY CULTURE” kind of way.
*In this brain structure, using this imaging technique, in this particular study. There are many similar studies that have failed to show similar effects elsewhere in the brain where you might expect such an effect.
True, but per the note in the article, research-wise it’s looking increasingly like there is a very high probability that the dimorphism & sexual orientation result is very likely to be caused, not by any genetic predispositions, but by the in utero hormonal environment.
I’m not going to disagree; it is the most popular hypothesis at the moment for the prenatal origin of homosexuality. Obviously the birth order effect is very compelling. The fact is, sexual orientation is super complex and its etiology is multifactorial, so I’m not willing to pin it on one thing or another. The fact that the author of the Slate piece is this worked up over the implications of this research at this stage is ludicrous to me. Everything he is saying here has been an issue at least since the linkage of the Xq28 locus to homosexuality and probably earlier than that. He’s just picking an odd time to say things like
I mean you can mess with the fruitless gene in Drosophila and generate all kinds of nifty effects on sexual behavior (including same-sex preference), but humans are going to be a much thornier model to manipulate.
I think the issue of aborting presumably gay fetuses is plausible and is something we need to worry about far before modification of human sexuality. Still, I don’t think this is going to become commonplace. Social attitudes towards homosexuality are becoming increasingly tolerant. I think society is just going to beat science to the punch on this one.
I think you are making a mistake by assuming that these technologies will be restricted to the more tolerant societies of the West.
Please see my comment above on sex-selection abortions. What makes you think some non-Western societies (say, in the Arab world) wouldn’t abort gay babies left and right the second they could reliably identify them?
Please provide a cite for this. I was under the impression that they were rather easy to obtain in Egypt, and that Arabs from other countries would go there for that purpose.
BTW, we get your point, Diogenes. You’re such a pro-choice zealot that the baby isn’t a human being in your opinion until after birth, and before then may be treated in any fashion with no regard for other considerations of justice.
If this is going to be your sole contribution to this thread, perhaps you ought to bail out now. Most of us, regardless of where on the spectrum we fall, do not see things in terms so stark.
Well, I’m pro-choice, but not a zealot, and I agree 100% with **Diogenes **on this issue. No one talked about aborting 3rd trimester fetuses here. The vast majority of abortions are performed in the first 2 months of gestation anyway.
So, what would be wrong if the Chinese started aborting gay fetuses?