Ninme has challenged me to fisk one Mary Ann Siegart for defending sex-selection. I am too tired to fisk ninme, I can only rant. At first I was going to post a bunch of stories like this about what a disaster sex-selection abortion is turning out to be in China (and elsewhere), but then I read the whole column and saw that she's aware of the problem. She just doesn't think any such imbalances would happen in the West. I wouldn't care to test that theory, personally, but let that be. Reading on, I decided her editor must hate her, because he or she actually let the following make it into print.
As the law stands at the moment, couples are forced to try again and again for the sex they want. The resulting children are bound to sense the disappointment that their parents feel when the squirt of lemon or the high-sodium diet or the immaculate timing hasn’t worked.
As for the idea that choosing your child’s sex is somehow immoral, why do the same critics not inveigh against these more homespun techniques? The intention behind them is exactly the same, after all, whether you are dosing yourself with salty food or sending his sperm to a lab.
Ummm, I dunno, Mary Ann, maybe because salting my food doesn't cause me to treat a unique and unrepeatable person as a commodity I shop around for? Maybe because a squirt of lemon doesn't tempt me to kill the child in my womb if it's not the gender I paid good money for? The immorality doesn't lie in having a preference for one sex over the other in any given pregnancy; it lies in so devaluing the unique person you are calling into existence so that you turn him into an object (and perhaps don't accept him if he doesn't come out as planned.) Sheesh. It's your child, not a puppy.
And by the way, regarding this comment
We are in danger of letting the “yuck factor” determine our legislation. Thirty
years ago, the yuck factor nearly put paid to IVF, which was then known — a
little yuckily — as “test-tube babies”. Now IVF is commonplace and few people
find it disturbing.
Actually, anyone who values human life finds IVF disturbing --not least because it requires parents to create at least 2-3 and usually as many 6 or 7 embryos for implantation, to increase the odds that at least one will "take." Generally speaking, every time we see an IVF baby, we are also looking at the ghosts of two to five siblings Mummy & Daddy gently "selected" [read:aborted] away or have frozen somewhere. That's a lot of ghosts. So I'm glad you brought up IVF, because it illustrates the threat that a sense of entitlement is to respect for the dignity of the human person. Once we understood that children have the right to parents, but adults don't have the right to children. Now that we feel entitled to have children, we feel entitled to create, kill or freeze them at will --and hey, if you have the right to a child, it should look the way you want it to --that's also your right, no?
Then when the child is older you will wonder why she has low self-esteem and is too cynical to believe in unconditional love when you have taught her that her value lies not in her unique and unrepeatable humanity --the mere fact that she is-- but in whether you found her arrival convenient and her appearance as ordered. And you will wonder why you have to keep her inside all day --why you have to continuously protect her from thugs and cads and ruffians who treat other people as objects. Why is there so little respect for life these days you will ask yourself? Why, indeed.
