Gender Selection

[Aksannyi]

Which I agree with, but you actively went out of your way to disparage gays in the process. I WILL NOT ALLOW FOR THIS INJUSTICE and all that.

Anyway, sorry for the derail. I've pretty much already said my piece on how I feel about gender selection so I feel there's nothing more I can add to this thread.

[kuronosan]

Which I agree with, but you actively went out of your way to disparage gays in the process. I WILL NOT ALLOW FOR THIS INJUSTICE and all that.

Anyway, sorry for the derail. I've pretty much already said my piece on how I feel about gender selection so I feel there's nothing more I can add to this thread.

Disparage? What the hell are you talking about?

You're being a bit defensive. I in no way implied that a gay football player was a bad thing. What I was implying was that parents have dreams for their kids that the children won't necessarily share.

[archibaldcrane]

And you did a shitty job of it and got corrected.

[Enkidu]

My contention isn't whether it's normal to want your kids to be born with a certain sex. My issue is with actually choosing the sex of your child. It's one thing to say that it's normal to want something and another thing entirely to actually go out and get it. Just because you think it's normal to want a boy or a girl doesn't mean you automatically think it's a good idea to get to choose the sex of your children.

Why would it be a bad idea? It doesn't harm the mother and IVF has very minimal side effects for the child... It looks like you're just peeing in someone's cheerios now. I get it, you thought it was genetic engineering and that's bad, so this is bad. Now you've been corrected, just move on.

It's fine to have a personal opinion on this, but saying others shouldn't be able to do this and/or should be shamed for doing it is just bigotry.

[Kuya]

Other people, Including myself, have already explained why we think it's a bad idea. Either attend to the arguments being made and cease making straw men or leave the thread.

[kuronosan]

And you did a shitty job of it and got corrected.

Fair enough.

[Enkidu]

Other people, Including myself, have already explained why we think it's a bad idea. Either attend to the arguments being made and cease making straw men or leave the thread.

I addressed your position and as I said, it's an opinion with little logical basis. Clearly you don't agree with the practice, which is fine, I couldn't care less. However when you say stupid shit like these people should be shamed or discouraged you should at least back that up with something reasonable. Otherwise it's simply bigotry.

It's a safe and standard procedure most middle-class families can afford. Claiming it could lead to gender disparity is baseless, it's been a standard procedure for around 20 years now with no concerns. The only moral dilemmas are related to whether or not you agree with the destruction of human embryos, hence why the majority of people who disagree with this are religious.

It also has far less commoditization potential then other practices such as adoption, surrogacy, and sperm banks. Again, why is it a bad idea?

[Kuya]

You didn't address shit. This is the last time i'm bringing this point up and if you don't want to address it, i will be ignoring you. Here's your last chance:

Any person who works in adoption will tell you the hardest part about talking to parents is working with their expectations when adopting. Parents want kids who are as young as possible, the same race as them or possibly white. People who work in adoption have to work with people's perceptions of adoption as a toys r us where they sell babies. Parents need to be constantly reminded that adoption is an exercise in love. They have to do this because it's perfectly natural for parents to want to pick out kids based on their own preference, and that includes gender and sex. But any person who works in adoption will tell you that having a child is about unconditional love. It doesn't benefit children to be seen as mini-me or a puppet.

Allowing parents to choose the sex of their children, much less race or sexual orientation, I think, is sending the wrong message about what parenting is about. A message about molding your children into what you want them to be, instead of accepting them for who and what they are. I think the latter is much more important since the reality of the fact is that more often than not, your children will become something you didn't expect and you might not be happy about.

Despite my disapproval of choosing the sex of your child, however, i don't think it's reasonable to ban it either. Might be too hard to enforce since there's lots of ways you can choose the sex of your child, some worse than others. IVF might be the safest and most effective way to do that. But if you've been paying attention to what I said, it should be obvious by now that i don't agree with choosing the sex of your children whether it be via adoption, IVF or genetic engineering. I understand it's completely natural and inevitable that parents want to have these choices because they have preferences, but my argument is that this choice doesn't benefit children and places unnecessary expectations on their behaviors and appearances. Evidently, i'm coming from the perspective of someone who is not heterosexual and has had to cope with one's parents and society's unjustified expectations of heterosexuality.

If we cared more about accepting our children for who they are, and showing more discipline when it comes to controlling our innate tendencies to project unto our children, I think we'd have happier kids running around. I'm willing to compromise on the issue, but at the very least I think we should discourage this kind of outlook of kids as your RPG character creation screen, and encourage that unconditional love comes first and preferences second.

[Thunder]

What about preference first and unconditional love anyway?

What's "preferences second" even mean lol. Have no preference?

[RKenshin]

I think there's a difference between what you want as a starting point, and what you want in development, and what you want at the end... and the people that want one, two, or all three of those things.

Wanting or preferring to start from X point doesn't guarantee or even necessarily imply anything about what you want/prefer past that point, or whether you accept deviations from it. The further down the road you 'expect' things, the more dangerous/harmful it is of course ("I'm gonna have a little baby girl that's gonna go to X college and become a lawyer and buy a house and have 4 kids of their own, etc!"). But simply wanting a girl to start with doesn't imply you expect things like that, or have some grand plan beyond it, or that you'd like/dislike them changing genders any more or less than you would if you had a boy.

People with all these 'grand plans' for their children will exist whether or not there is a choice of a starting point available, and I don't think simply having the choice there is any more likely to encourage or cause that.

[Enkidu]

but my argument is that this choice doesn't benefit children and places unnecessary expectations on their behaviors and appearances.

And this argument, again, has little logical basis. There's zero evidence that choosing sex in anyway changes the expectations of the parents. Most parents find out well before the child is born anyways. PGD is simply removing the coin toss.

Again, this is a better argument against surrogacy/sperm banks, since in those cases couples are actually choosing genetic preferences. Expectations not relating to ones own genetics can obviously change based on these choices (i.e. if a couple chooses a "high IQ sperm" they expect a smart child or "athletic sperm" an athlete). At the same time, assuming these expectations are hard goals for the parents is still a poor assumption for reasons outlined by RKenshin above.

[kuronosan]

I don't really think the issues lie with selecting gender so much as the parents' reason for it.

[Xno Kappa]

Even then, in this specific instance the parents already had 3 sons. I think it's perfectly reasonable to remove the coin toss at this point. This is just a natural extension of the right to choose and what daddy/mommy did or did not do in your own childhood is completely irrelevant.

[Salodin]

I know a few older couples who deeply wish that they could have had a child of the other sex, instead of 2 or 3 children of the same sex like they have. They don't love them any less, they just wish they could have raised the other sex. There's nothing wrong with that, and science can increase our chances of doing so. What's the problem?

[RKenshin]

^ Honestly I see that being the most common use of something like this, by far.

Most couples have two kids, and most couples want to have one of each - a boy and a girl. Rather than leave the second kid to chance, this is more than likely where something like this option would come in.

Not many people I know/have heard of are extremely adament about the sex of their first kid; it's usually the one(s) after that. And it's usually just to have the experience of raising both, not because of the 'grand plan' mindset.

[kuronosan]

If it's not a grand plan thing, I don't think I could care less.

I just worry about the psychological health of a parent obsessed with having certain kids. What's to say, to play devil's advocate, that it won't gravitate to "I always wanted to raise a talented singer" and "I always wanted an athlete instead of the fatties I ended up with"?

I'm concerned this will be growing into eugenics rather than wish fulfillment.

[Salodin]

I feel like we'll cross that bridge when we get there. For now though, this is not that problem.

[kuronosan]

Good point.

[Kuya]

I can concede that as far as picking a child of a certain sex because you already have kids of another, it's not a big deal.

[Xajii]

It is an interesting discussion - we have to examine what should be allowable and what is "morally okay" for the individual and then look at what it means for the world at large.

I'm coming from a perspective as a mid-20s someone in a relationship with a 30-year old where both of us have no interest in children whatsoever. Just saying this up front because I'm sure things like this enter into our bias when we look at the topic.

To me, the decision to have a child is a personal one, never a global one. I think it is crazy to expect any individual to look at that big, important part of their life and try to consider anything other than their own lives in that decision. This means that I think it is shitty when a person gets big pressure from their family to "continue the family name/bloodline", and I also think it is shitty to try and enforce population control, despite the fact that I still consider overpopulation to be an enormous issue in the modern world.

That being said, as far as personal decisions go, it has to be on the biggest of scales, and in large volumes, these personal decisions we all make have a drastic (universal) effect on the world at large. So, I can definitely see the point of view that making pre-determined decisions like these is a slippery slope.

I guess from my point of view I don't see it as concerning or mentally ill to have a preference and want to seek that out if it is possible. We choose the age and breed of pets we get, we choose everything about our lives that we possibly can. Most people try to choose when they have their child, too. To me it seems like the next logical step in that way of life to want to choose things about that child. Coming from someone who does not want children at all, if I were in some bizarre situation where I had to have a kid you'd better believe I'm choosin every little thing I can. Why not? I have to deal with the kid for the rest of my life, might as well do as much as I can to make that bearable for myself. That's my perspective.

Why does it somehow make it okay for someone to choose the gender if they've already rolled the dice once? What is the point of this "rite of passing" - why do parents have to be run through the gauntlet of randomness if there is the option of choosing? It makes no sense. The only argument I've read here suggests that parents are going to be unfit to raise a child if they enter in with preferences. I find that rather absurd. Like I said, I can damn well assure you my parents preferred I didn't come out nearly blind and ginger and short and whatever else, but they still raised me well enough. Would they magically not have raised me well if they got what they wanted? Do we have to teach parents a lesson by plunging them into the randomness - and sometimes tragic - world of pregnancy and birth and childhood before they "earn the right" to do something that is scientifically possible?

But that's just a very micro-oriented look at it, and the macro is more abstract, long-term, and theoretical. What kind of issues would the world face if everyone chose their child's gender, complexion, personality traits even? This is a discussion worth having, I suppose, though it opens up so many cans of worms I can't even think where to begin. Who gets to decide where the line is drawn? We already do a ton of shit that's unnatural as hell when it comes to birthing...