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| No | 82% | 578 votes | Total: 706 votes | |
| Yes | 18% | 128 votes |
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Add to FavoritesThe stark and unpalatable truth of the matter is that gender selection has been going on for millennia, often in the most brutal fashion and for barely rational reasons. It still occurs regardless of rarefied debates on ethics.
I subscribe to the secular, Western take on this issue. One gender or another should not be regarded as a disease, nor in a right-thinking society be regarded as a social or economic millstone for parents. Advances in genetic science should not be used to indulge the vanity of parents who want to pre-order linebackers or ballerinas; nor should they be a pretext for certain religious communities to air their ancient prejudices.
The raw science isn't at fault, it's just that the application is problematic. If we're given the means to eradicate genetic diseases that cause suffering and impair quality of life, we should use them. Perhaps if technology and resources one day permit it, the hit-list of diseases should include eczema and myopia as well as cystic fibrosis and muscular dystrophy. But does it then follow that poor hand-eye coordination or a probable lifespan below 90 are genetic defects to be repaired? What if functional immortality is one day possible? Would we be tempted to accept sterility and cultural atrophy to dodge the reaper? Should governments try to engineer equal numbers of men and women in the interests of contentment?
It is far too easy for this debate to drift into the lofty terrain where genetic science mutates into science fiction. Germline gene therapy, whereby DNA is repaired before replication, remains theoretical. Somatic gene therapy, the repair of genetic disease in isolation with no prospect of propagating a corrected version, is still an experimental area. The crude truth is that genetic science can typically only cure a disease by identifying its probable occurrence, thereby allowing parents to avoid or terminate a conception.
In this way, a clinical argument can arise for certain parents to choose a gender. For example, Haemophilia is a recessive disorder linked to the X-chromosome. Women carry the disorder but have another X-chromosome to mask it. The Y-chromosome however cannot mask the defect so even though a male child can't propagate the disease, they are likely to manifest it. If the means were available, a medical practitioner would have to advise a female carrier against having a male child if at all possible.
Yet even here, there is danger. Widely available genetic screening and awareness of its potential might see us stumbling into a new culture of eugenics. A combination of free parental choice and the preferences of employers and insurers would not only make genotypes of the wrong profile or gender less desirable than ever, it might prevent many of them being born at all.
We might come full circle and share a dilemma familiar to the peasant farmer in the Yangtze Basin. The cultural pressures acting on him and his forebears have created a warped demographic in South-East Asia whereby men outnumber women by tens of millions. The disproportion is large enough to mirror the excess of females in the countries most damaged by the two world wars.
While Bangalore leads a regional technological revolution, elsewhere in India dowry deaths' still occur. In China, it is illegal for doctors to disclose a child's gender before birth. Where male children are culturally and economically useful and their sisters deemed a burden or a liability, parents will too often follow an old pattern. The ability to determine gender in utero is a relatively recent development, so historically infanticide has been far more common than any other form of choosing a baby's gender.
This debate can't be led by science, as technology only changes the means by which old prejudices are enacted. Unless positive cultural change is pursued, gender selection in all its time-honoured horror will keep happening regardless of how people in white coats, pin-stripe suits or GAP t-shirts feel about it.
Learn more about this author, Gavin Smith.
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Yes
I really should learn to stop responding to individuals who think my personal decisions are any of their business. Since I have a son, and my husband and I have talked about having another, we have been asked how many we'll be having. I want four, and my husband thinks two is plenty. I have mentioned more than once that I'd like a daughter, so, naturally, people ask what I'd do if the next one or two babies happen to be boys. I think they were trying to lead me to a mushy, gushy admission that I would accept and love any baby I had. While that is definitely true, I answered quite candidly that I have no problem taking my husband to a fertility clinic to have his sperm separated in a centrifuge so that we could have a girl.
I have been amazed at the negative response my admission has provoked. I have been admonished for "playing god," being shallow or selfish, for not loving my son, and for furthering the moral disintegration of our society. These accusations have ranged from simply laughable, to downright offensive. Of course I love my son. I wouldn't trade him for all the daughters in the world. However, I have always pictured my family with both a boy and a girl in it. This seems more balanced to me.
The feminist in me understands that it's wrong to think that I need to have a daughter to pass on my feminine traditions, and my husband needs a son to pass on his masculine ones. This attitude has certainly furthered many troubling issues that feminists are dealing with. A mother should share her love of dance with both her sons and daughters, just as a father should share his automotive repair skills with both sexes. But we all know that there is more to having children than simply passing on traditions.
It can also mean passing on diseases. Some genetic disorders are specific to one gender or another. If both parents carry a gene that gives them a 50% chance of having a daughter with a rare defect, it doesn't take a brain surgeon to understand why these parents would elect to have only boys. I think this is both the responsible and logical conclusion.
It's also logical to expect that parents who desperately want a son, but already have 3 daughters, to gender select for a boy instead of trying their luck and possibly expanding their family beyond their financial abilities. It's much more responsible to have two children, one of whom you gender selected for, and both of whom you can support and give every advantage to, than to simply keep having children until you have at least one of each gender and then cannot afford to give them a reasonable chance to succeed because your time and money are stretched too thin amongst your many offspring.
Unwanted children of either gender can sometimes be abused, as well. It has been documented in China, famous for its one child per family rule, that boys are more desired, and as such baby girls are sometimes aborted or, more rarely, killed after birth to give the parents another shot at the revered male child. China is not the only society in which these atrocities have occurred, but it is only fair to say that these actions are not the norm. It is much more common for an unwanted child to be simply ignored, abused or otherwise treated as inferior. I personally knew a man who was the only boy in a family with 5 children. His parents had only wanted a single, male child. Instead, they ended up with a large, female-dominated family. While they were never abusive to the girls, they were never given the same advantages as their brother. His college fund was full and he could go to any school he was accepted to. The girls were expected to pay their own way. The girls were sent to the local public school, while he went to an expensive parochial school specializing in college preparation. He was given an allowance and encouraged to study instead of work, while the girls all needed part-time jobs in high school. His parents bought him his first car even though his sisters had to pay for their own vehicles. The favoritism goes on to this day. Are his sisters loved? Of course they are. Their parents don't abuse or neglect them. But I would definitely say that their parents should have simply gender selected for their son right away so that they would not have brought four daughters into the world that they have clearly given inferiority complexes to. One daughter has been in and out of jail and has to deal with drug problems. Another has been through 4 bad marriages. Two of them had children at 18, and those same girls have multiple children, each with a different father. Our society does not need more people with these issues just because their parents didn't really want them.
The argument that allowing everyone to select for either gender they choose would unbalance the sexes, is flawed. It is a fact that the majority of parents gender selecting for a non-medical reason, are trying to have a child of a different gender than the one they already have at home. Most of these parents have a boy and want a little sister for him. And, all these years after this practice became available to the public, our birth rates are still 50% male and 50% female.
No child should ever feel unwanted. Anything we can ethically do to prevent this is beneficial. For those of you who believe that gender selection is "against god's plan," I offer this food for thought: This procedure is not 100% foolproof. People have selected for a boy and ended up with a girl, and vice-versa. What is meant to be, will be, regardless of our current scientific advances.
Learn more about this author, Sarah Grau.
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