Is it ethical to allow couples to decide the sex of their child?

Futurist Topics - Cloning

Sex Selection - Should Sex Selection be allowed for parents wanting a baby boy or girl?

Sex Selection is widely practised around the world.

While most people would be horrified at the thought of murdering a newborn baby just because it is the wrong gender, this has been happening in India and China, possibly elsewhere. Reports suggest that the ratio of men to women in China has been profoundly altered as a result of the state single child policy.  Sex Selection has become a national issue.

The Academy of Social Sciences in Bejing research times have found that in some parts of China there are 120 boys to only 100 girls because of Sex Selection - natural births produce a ratio of 105 to 100. Another study of women migrating to Bejing found they were arriving with 159 boys to only 100 girls. Sex Selection in China has already produced a very profound national imbalance with many tens of millions of young men now growing up without women to marry.

In India there is a similar problem with Sex Selection, and this has been the case for many years. A study in 1985 of women having amniocentesis (sampling of cells in the fluid surrounding a developing foetus in the womb) in Mumbai (Bombay) found that 90% were carried out to determine the sex of the child, and that 96% testing positive for a girl resulted in abortion. Although now illegal to abort in India on the basis of Sex Selection alone, ultrasound is commonly used to make the diagnosis before the 20th week of pregnancy and abortion is a common result.

Sex Selection is a problem (by one method or another) because many parents have decided that if they are only going to have one child, it should be a boy. In India, baby girls are also valued far less than baby girls in some communities.

In the UK recently, two parents who had seen a daughter die requested Sex Selection to guarantee that their next child be a girl, but were refused - against British law.  They said that they had many sons and desperately needed a daughter.  Indeed they claimed that they had a human right to a baby girl and that Sex Selection should be allowed - as an exception for them. Since then, regulations have been relaxed although Sex Selection for personal preferences is still against the law - unlike the US.

The trouble is that society as a whole is not capable of handling Sex Selection without terrible results.  Cultures vary - even amongst different communities inside the same nation or city.  A report in October 2000 found that 75% of newly wed couples in Japan want their first child to be a girl - and if many families have only one child, what then?  Even if they all have two children, statistically there will be far too many women in Japanese society, assuming Sex Selection becomes common practice.

And why stop at Sex Selection?  Why not start selecting future babies on the basis of predicted intelligence, athletic ability, musical talent, height or personality tendencies?   The human genome project, coupled with Genetic engineering research is giving us huge powers to predict the future of human beings.  We don't yet know which genes are good at predicting intelligence, but there is no doubt that we will.  What then?

You can be sure that there will be huge pressures, if Sex Selection becomes normalised, to continue with selection for a host of other characteristics.

Do you really want to live in that kind of world?  A world where Sex Selection routinely condemns to destruction healthy foetuses just because they don't fit the personal preferences of selfish parents? Or where children are only conceived and loved if they are of the "right" sex?

Article written 1998

There are no comments yet

Leave a Comment

Your name*
Your email: 
(if you want notifcation of replies)

Subject:

1