Nothing much is sacred these days. By sacred I don’t mean sitting in a church praying about it but rather that there isn’t a lot of ideas we as a society won’t entertain.

One of them that sticks out in my mind is the idea of designer babies. Currently a fledgling technology, we’re still obviously a few years from logging into some website and designing what we think is the perfect aesthetically pleasing baby yet.

Meanwhile the technology to choose your babies’ gender is already here and with a five year moratorium prohibiting superficial use of the tech almost up, the IVF sector has already begun to campaign for baby gender selection to be unleashed onto Australian mainstream society.

The worrying news is that it’s been tipped that they’ll get their way.

Currently baby gender selection is illegal in Australia except in cases where the parents have a serious disease that has a high probability of being carried onto a specific gender.

This in my mind is totally acceptable and I fully support the use of gender selection technology in screening for serious genetic diseases.

What I have trouble with is the widespread use of the technology to create ‘perfect’ socially engineered families. Even if we put aside the religious, ethical and humane arguments for a second, baby gender selection has already been proven not to work on a large scale in countries like China.

In China the practice of baby gender selection is illegal but still widely practiced. As a result the Chinese government puts it’s male to female ratio at 118:100 and rising.

In some cities such as Guangdong and Hainan the ratio is at 130:100. It’s been predicted that should current trends continue by 2020 there’s going to be a lot of Chinese males out there unable to find partners.

Anyone want to take a punt on what happens when a country of over a billion people is full of males who can’t get any sex?

Then you’ve got the crazy countries who either due to religious, social, economic or superstitious reasons want male babies and nothing else. Traditionally you’d just throw your female baby off a cliff or into a river, which for most should have been a pretty big deterrent against social gender selection… now you just go see a doctor.

I can’t begin to think of the social problems in 20-30 years time if areas like the middle east and India decide to only pump out male babies.

In the west we tend not to have such a gender prejudice. Parents get put in old people homes and it’s not like we’ve got dowry’s or other religious gender crap to worry about. To be honest I don’t know what’s worse though. A couple opting for social gender engineering on the grounds of superficiality, or doing so because they don’t want to pay a dowry.

I’m one of four boys and it’s no secret that my parents were trying for a girl before giving up after the four of us popped out. Had the technology been available to them I’m not entirely sure they wouldn’t have opted for it.

What doesn’t sit right with me is the knowledge that they might have perhaps chose to just have a boy and a girl. Sure not having a sister has meant that I’m probably a little less equipped to deal with females but at least I know our family was made up of chance. Nobody ‘designed’ it.

I’m not exactly sure why that’s such a big deal to me but it just is. Knowing my parents pre-planned their children down to the very gender we would be just trivialises the whole ‘having children’ thing down to baking a specific type of cake because you felt like banana that day.

I’m lucky in that despite wanting a girl, my parents provided for my brothers and I and accepted us as males. This is obviously a potential problem, yet when addressing it supporters of gender selection seem to have somehow turned it back onto the unborn child. IVF pioneer Gob Kovacs argues that

It might even be in the interests of the child to have their sex selected.

If a couple so badly want a boy or a girl they are prepared to go through IVF and sex selection at great cost and effort rather than getting pregnant naturally, then maybe if they had the child naturally and it was the wrong sex it may not be looked after as well.


What?

Sorry mate but if parents are that superficial that having a baby of an undesirable gender to them means child abuse and neglect, then what the hell are they doing having kids in the first place?!

And what’s this nonsense about ‘the wrong sex’. Since when was it right or wrong to have a male or female baby?

Kovacs continues;

at a cost of between $10,000-$15,000, only those who were extremely determined would go for sex selection.


I think it’s pretty obvious we can replace ‘extremely determined’ with ‘wealthy’. Mind you with the baby bonus up to whatever it is now $10,000 becomes $5000 which is easily in reach of the middle class.

This talk of money however and using it as justification in that most people can’t afford it so it’s ok outlines the thinly veiled argument put forward by the IVF sector. What we’re really looking at here is obscene amounts of money to be made thinly dressed up in mock concern about the welfare of ‘wrong gender’ babies due to neglectful parents.

Only instead of blaming superficial parents we’re now blaming unborn babies. Yes, we need mainstream baby gender selection so that we can help babies avoid being born the wrong gender.

What a crock.


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