Gender selection
An article in the New York Times recently debates the ethics of doctors assisting patients to select the gender of their offspring. It’s a contentious subject - sex selection either before birth or shortly afterwards is widespread in China and India where social norms pressure the gender balance towards males. For centuries, families without sons feared poverty and neglect. The male offspring represented continuity of lineage and protection in old age. Combined with the one-child policy in China, females have been reduced to a burden that may "accidently" be removed… so much so that in 2005 there were 118 boys born for every 100 girls, in China.
If you want to select for gender, there are two options - before conception by sorting sperm / conceiving in particular positions / eating certain foods, or through gender determination (IVF, sonography, genetic testing etc) and termination of a pregnancy. For some reason, the former is considered ok while the latter is not, perhaps because it is more accurate and somehow more brutal.
Because female-making sperm are bigger than male-making sperm, the former are much easier to sort than the latter. So the technique is more successful for people wanting females than for those wanting males - and in the first world, it’s probably not going to make a big enough difference to skew the gender balance. However, in countries like China and India where is does matter so desperately, the technology will be available (and is to a certain point), and will be used to ensure that more boys than girls will be born.
This is terrible in a lot of ways - in the future, there will be far fewer women to marry and so leave many more men unmarried and this has been shown to increase violence in a given society. Violence towards women tends to increase as the number of women in a society goes down, and the imbalance in social structures, especially inheritance and property distribution, will be interesting to observe.
My personal opinion - if I had a choice, I would have girls. But I don’t have that explicit choice and I am not hung up on it so I’d also be happy to healthy babies. If it matters to someone what gender their children are, to the point that they’ll go through testing and possibly abortion to change the situation, then I say more power to them. If it suddenly became free to have IVF, gender testing, sperm sorting or similar then I would have a problem if at the same time midwifery care was expensive, prenatal care non-existent for large numbers of Australian women, and insurance unavailable to midwives.
