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Nearly all cultures have practiced traditional methods of predetermining whether a baby will be born male or female freely for hundreds, if not thousands of years. And nobody was ever concerned about it. The reason people are starting to care now is how the determination is being done. The practice is no longer limited to shamanistic ritual or wizardry, and specific sexual positions during lovemaking, eating certain foods, or grandma's folklore, none of which have ever proved effective, by the way. There is this method and that method, which rely on sex being performed at specific times during the ovulation cycle, but there is no real guarantee that any of them will succeed either. Science has found a way around all of that however, and this method, gender determination, has proved to be extremely effective, thus far. Now people are concerned.

Though gender determination is still in its infancy, as applied to humans, it is already being practiced with great success. Parents have sought it as a means of screening a father's sperm for genetic predisposition of specific diseases, but at the same time, it can allow the parents to determine a gender, if so desired. Scientists though, who think genetic screening is great for eliminating diseases, don't think it's ethical to use for gender determination.

One might even ask why people would want to do gender determination. In many cultures of the world, male birth is generally preferred so that the family's bloodline is maintained. Other cultures prefer males to females because females are thought generally to be inferior to males. In poor societies, if a girl is going to wed, her family has to pay a dowry, whereas the family of a son who is going to wed receives the dowry. In these societies, it is therefore preferential to have sons rather than daughters. The parents even practice abortion when necessary, as a means of birth control if it's discovered that the baby carried is a girl. In a humanitarian sense, if you can call it that, gender predetermination would prevent needless, cruel, and perhaps dangerous abortions from being performed. But instead of changing social traditions, the obvious choice is to meddle with nature for the sake of economics.

As long as animals, particularly mammals, have had sex and conceived, nature has randomly selected whether the offspring will be male or female, although the selection tends to lean slightly more in favor of the baby being male at conception. This statistic states that

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