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[Poll #204849]
I've been listening to bits of the discussion about this following the confirmation from the HFEA that parents will only be able to perform gender selection for medical reasons (e.g. avoiding heamophilia), not personal, social or "so-called family balancing reasons" but I'm afraid I'm finding that this is one of those questions where I'm not entirely sure what to think. On the one hand, I've heard very few good arguments against gender selection. Many people seem to have a gut reaction against it, but I don't understand why. This encourages me to align it in my mind with the many other scientific debates where the public have ill-informed objections. On the other hand, I'm not sure I can see good reasons for allowing it either. I don't think, for example, that it should be available on the NHS for non medical reasons.
The one reasonable person I heard speaking against it argued essentially that gender selection gives you an illusion of control which, if it doesn't work out could be damaging for you and the child. So for example you chose to have a girl because you have a certain perception of the way girls are. If your child turns out still not to be like that (perhaps she's a tomboy, for example) then your disappointment will affect you as a parent and the development of your child. This makes sense to me, but is it a strong enough arguement to restrict choice? After all, there are plently of avenues available for the parent/child relationship to mess up. If you're fixated on having a girl and you have a boy, won't your feelings of dissappointment in that case have a similar effect?
So what do you think? And more importantly, why do you think it?
I've been listening to bits of the discussion about this following the confirmation from the HFEA that parents will only be able to perform gender selection for medical reasons (e.g. avoiding heamophilia), not personal, social or "so-called family balancing reasons" but I'm afraid I'm finding that this is one of those questions where I'm not entirely sure what to think. On the one hand, I've heard very few good arguments against gender selection. Many people seem to have a gut reaction against it, but I don't understand why. This encourages me to align it in my mind with the many other scientific debates where the public have ill-informed objections. On the other hand, I'm not sure I can see good reasons for allowing it either. I don't think, for example, that it should be available on the NHS for non medical reasons.
The one reasonable person I heard speaking against it argued essentially that gender selection gives you an illusion of control which, if it doesn't work out could be damaging for you and the child. So for example you chose to have a girl because you have a certain perception of the way girls are. If your child turns out still not to be like that (perhaps she's a tomboy, for example) then your disappointment will affect you as a parent and the development of your child. This makes sense to me, but is it a strong enough arguement to restrict choice? After all, there are plently of avenues available for the parent/child relationship to mess up. If you're fixated on having a girl and you have a boy, won't your feelings of dissappointment in that case have a similar effect?
So what do you think? And more importantly, why do you think it?
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Re: Hmmm, I hadn't given it any serious thought
Date: November 17th, 2003 04:11 am (UTC)From:I can't see any reason, other than compelling medical reasons, for having the 'option' of 'choice'.
Nobody in this small group of 'pro-choice' folk seems to have addressed the question I posed earlier: what message do we send to our children if we tell them that they had to be the 'right' sex in order to be born? I honestly did want a daughter; I have a son; I am delighted, endlessly lucky, amazed, to have any child who is healthy after a difficult pregnancy and birth. Children who are not valued for themselves are cowed from an early age; I see children every day who because of their sex believe themselves to be inferiro and in some way undeserving and it is pitiable to behold.
I can't think of any personally-constructed desire for "choice" as more important than the joy and self-esteem of a child. I don't think adults should have an automatic right to a technology which inherently reinforces such soul-destroying tendencies. "For if anyone puts a stumbling-block before these little ones, I tell you, it would be better for him to have a milstone around his neck and be flung into the sea..." and I agree with that: adults have to be responsible beings, and society should not further encourage them to be selfish, self-indulgent, and petty at the expense of a child.
It is true that some people just prefer to have a child of one sex or another; but frankly, excepting compelling medical reasons, I think that's just hard cheese. We shouldn't always have everything we want.
Puritanically yours... :-)