Today, I had fast food for lunch. I took a birth control pill. I answered a personal email message while at work. When my children and I got home, I let them play outside before making them buck down and do their homework.
It sounds like a lot of private nothing, but you and I both know that, somewhere, somebody thinks that each of these decisions is his or her business. I don't. And that's the same attitude I have to take when I hear about parents-to-be using a sperm-sorting service to increase their changes of conceiving a son or daughter. It's simply not my business.
I consider myself pro-choice, meaning that I believe women have the right to make reproductive decisions for themselves--even though I'm not sure I would have an abortion myself. Similarly, I had my boys the old-fashioned, luck-of-the-draw way, and, even if I could afford it, I'm not sure that I would have wanted the option of sex selection. (To be clear: this is about sex selection that has no medical reasons attached.) But I get squeamish when we start tossing around words like "wrong" about private, no-foul decisions.
There's something about new technology that will always, for at least some of the population, provoke an Oh-my-God-that's-unnatural reaction. Remember the early days of in vitro fertilization and the uproar about "test tube babies"? These days, you'd have to go pretty far into the fringe to find someone upset with a parent who conceives with the help of IVF. There are lots of things we do now that, when they were new, were considered wrong or strange: Telling a young child he's adopted, having children with someone of another race, giving women the right to vote, engaging in sex before marriage. At one point, we used to think breastfeeding was wrong, at least for people of a certain class.
So what is it about sex selection that drives people to judge? Their strongest argument, I think, is that, by selecting one sex over the other, parents-to-be are essentially saying one sex is better than the other. And, no matter what a person's take on gender is, this doesn't sit right with a lot of people. Witness our horror at places like India or China where boys are the gold standard of new babies, and girls inspire a sad shake of the head, or worse.
But that doesn't seem to be the case in the U.S.: according to a July 2006 article in the New York Observer most clinicians who offer sex selection services report that their clientele is evenly divided between those who want girls and those who want boys. One director reported that, in fact, girls "outpaced" boys three to one.
Of course, you can turn this argument on its head and envision a country in the future populated by three women to every one man (giving the phrase "if you were the last man on earth" a new relevance, I'd imagine.) In this scenario, the very option of being able to choose a son or a daughter would lead to humans thwarting The Natural Way. Of course this is an extreme conclusion to draw, just as extreme as saying that abortions will lead to the end of procreation or that IVF will lead to a new race of quasi-robot children. It's just not going to happen.
First off, it's prohibitively expensive for most of us. And that expense is, of course, where I believe a lot of the push-back regarding sex selection comes from. Mothers--especially poor mothers--are often set up as the punching bag for a lot of society's ills. Good liberals know by now not to beat up on these women. But rich mothers? That's a different story--we can all join in there.
I believe what really doesn't sit right with those who oppose non-medically based sex selection is the stereotype of the would-be mother who can afford it. She wants a "designer" baby. She thinks she can bully nature into what she wants. She's pushy and grabby and a control freak. She demands to buy her way into her ideal of the perfect family. That New York Observer article actually invoked the name "Veruca Salt"--the brattiest of brats in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. As a culture, we don't like this woman, the one who embodies two of the ugliest stereotypes of the American woman: the shallow hysteric and the demanding bitch with a lotta cash.
But if you read about the women who are actually choosing to undergo sex selection--which, by the way, physically involves much more than writing a check--you'll find reasons that may not be medical but are compelling nonetheless. Sure, the frequently cited answer is "family balance," the idea that a family who already has a boy or two and wants a girl (or vice versa) achieves "balance" by having kids of both sexes. But other, surprising reasons crop up. One woman's beloved mother died and she was hoping to be part of a mother-daughter relationship again. Tell me, is that really so wrong?
In my own small way, I try to exert control over things that, fifty years ago, I would have had no say in--my decision to have a midwife attend the births of my children, say. I'm not the only one, either, and no one makes a peep when adoptive parents check the "boy" (or "girl") box. You can't know what goes on in another person's head, and therefore I don't feel comfortable judging the rightness or wrongness of a decision that harms no one.
It's too soon to tell if sperm sorting portends a Scary New Sex-Selected World and until I know, I'm not casting the first stone.
