This article reveals that some Asian families are using sex selection techniques to increase their chances of having a son, especially if their first child is a girl.
The main problem highlighted in this article is that the sex selection techniques are simply a fetal ultrasound to discover the sex of the baby, and then abortion if it is a girl. I don't want to get into the ethics of abortion here, so I want to discuss the implications of sex selection in general.
There are ways of increasing the probability of having a child of particular gender, but suppose you could pick for certain. However, you could only pick if you already had a child of the opposite sex. Therefore, you could only pick a boy if you already had a girl and vice versa.
I wouldn't have a problem with this at all. There are practical reasons why a parents would want to have a balance, and there are also practical reasons why parents would want to have a boy (to carry on the family name, manual labor, etc.) There are also practical reasons why a family would want to have a girl if their first child was a boy. I don't agree with Sandel and May in their argument that such a selection would remove the humility of parenthood and their general argument about "openness to the unbidden". You are not choosing the child's traits, simply what gender they are. And it is not like the parents have full control. They would not be able to choose to have a family of four boys.
1 comment:
I believe that Yuri is correct that parents' "openness to the unbidden" would not seem to be compromised by an ability to select the sex of their child if they could only choose if they had already had a child of the opposite sex. However, I believe that allowing this type of selection at all, from a legal standpoint, opens the floodgates for other changes because it purports one general rule as justification (this is, this type of selection would not drastically change the essential make-up of families) and thus allows people to narrow the problem to that single argument and say that another type of selection would be legitimate because it, too, would not change the essential structure of the family. Also, even though children would have numerous other uncontrollable qualities, the ability for a parent to choose something so essential does undermine their ability to accept whatever they are given and to accept the full responsibilities of the randomness of parenthood.
The argument that this amount of election would not compromise the equal distribution of genders is also incorrect because, in a society that favored male children and fewer numbers of children, parents could stop having children if they had one boy or they could have one girl and one boy. The ratio could potentially be 2:1 and thus even though individual families would be more equal, overall the gender ratio would be profoundly skewed.
Another potential problem: parents could be blamed, if they chose to keep a girl instead of waiting for a boy, for not promoting the overall economic welfare of the family because a boy, in the long-run, would be more beneficial in many areas for the family. The reason infanticide of females was so rampant (in some areas of the world) was because of this social expectation and economic necessity: allowing this practice could profoundly increase the expectations on parents to make sure that they have at least one boy because the selection process is, because legalized, legitimate.
I feel like this proposed policy is not entirely bad, but I do not think it pulls itself out of all the ethical debates because of its singular stipulation. This policy needs to be continually reassessed to make sure that it is not leading to the 2:1 gender ratio and that it is not putting undue pressure on parents to actually use it to make selections.
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