I know what it is to want--really want--a child of a particular sex. Back when my husband and I still believed we had some choice in things baby-related, I was sure I was meant to have a daughter. My whole life, in fact, seemed to point toward it. As a teenager, I'd been the close-as-family babysitter to three girls. In my twenties, I'd become the adoring aunt of two nieces. And I'd worked for most of my thirties creating dolls and books at a company that made products only for girls.
Even when my husband and I turned to adoption after years of trying to conceive, I still secretly hoped a girl might find her way to us. But, as with conception, little in the adoption process went according to plan. Just weeks from receiving our referral, I was astounded to discover I was pregnant.
We named him Joe.
Four years into being his mother, the idea that I ever wanted a girl seems as quaint and misguided as my having once wanted to be a doctor-ballerina. The very notion of being choosy about a child's sex has come to seem just a little absurd. But, in the United States, a small but apparently growing number of parents are paying thousands of dollars a try to have that very choice.
The technology that makes this possible without resorting to abortion was developed for use in the breeding of livestock. It allows technicians to separate the heavier X-chromosome-carrying, girl-making sperm in a semen sample from the Y-chromosome-carrying boy-making sperm. No federal laws govern who can receive this service. In 2001, The American Society of Reproductive Medicine opined that pre-conception sex-selection is "proper and ethical" for the purpose of family balancing. That is, it's okay to choose the sex of your child if you already have at least one of the other sex.
"Some of each" seems like a benign enough goal. The longer I am a parent, though, and the more deeply I've thought about my own original preferences, the more troubling the whole idea becomes.
If your faith regards children as gifts of God, the idea of ordering up one with particular specifications is anathema on its face. God, it might be said, does not look kindly on gift registries, and is even less tolerant of returns or exchanges. But you don't have to be religious to see the profound problems with specifying our children's characteristics.
Primogeniture has pretty much gone the way of buttonhooks and steam engines in our country, but studies suggest that North Americans may still prefer sons, especially first-born sons. It's hard to feel benign about a technology that offers a way of devaluing girls and women. But no matter what sex is selected, the very act of choosing can't really be anything but discrimination. In any given family, it renders one sex "good" and the other, at best, a consolation prize.
Then there is the question of "balance" beyond the nuclear family. It's unlikely the United States would ever witness the sex ratio problems of China or India, where boys are preferred for deeply entrenched religious and social reasons. But even if sex selection is limited to families who already have a child of the opposite sex, there's no guarantee that parents wanting to add one sex will be equal to the number wanting to add the other.
As a culture, though, we rarely rank concerns about far-off societal problems ahead of individual freedoms and happiness in the present (witness global warming). So it's worth considering what impact this control may actually have on how satisfied we are.
It's often said that the only thing worse than not getting what we want is getting it. In his recent book, Stumbling on Happiness, Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert backed that up with science. We are startlingly bad, research shows, at predicting how our choices will affect our own happiness. By engineering gender--or any of a potentially endless list of other characteristics that may soon become subject to selection--we close ourselves off to serendipity, the profound kind of happiness that comes not because we orchestrated it, but simply because we were open to it.
For me, some of the deepest lessons of parenthood come each time I'm forced to contend with the myth of the ideal child I imagined and come to terms with the one I've got. Sex selection only complicates this already difficult process. As any of us who has ever hoped for a boy or a girl knows, we aren't yearning simply for a particular pairing of chromosomes. We are imagining a particular boy or girl.
Sperm-sorting technology isn't foolproof. A couple wanting a girl has about a one-in-ten chance of getting a boy, and a couple wanting a boy has a one-in-four chance of ending up with a girl. Even if the asked-for chromosomes are present, the child may not fit the parents' gender expectations.
If that happens, most parents who specified pink or blue will, like the rest of us who took pot luck, draw themselves up, grieve a bit, and set full-bore to loving the child in front of them. But what if, having thought you'd found a way around this particular disappointment, you are left with the bitter taste of a deal gone wrong? "Waiter, this isn't what I ordered!" By that point, of course, the kitchen will be closed and there will be no returning what is on your plate.
I've come to place a lot of faith in serendipity. I was devastated to realize I had no say over whether I conceived a child, but I've found surprising comfort in knowing how little say I ultimately have over who my child is. A chance arrangement of genes in large part determines his temperament and talents. In this light, the countless mistakes I'll make in parenting him seem so much more forgivable. I am happiest being his mother when I keep in mind that I didn't--and can't--design him.
