April 23, 2004
GENDER BENDING
The future may hold some uncomfortable quandaries for feminists
interested in reproductive freedom. This week's [1/28/04]
Newsweek features a story about a relatively low-cost way to
choose with almost 100% accuracy the gender of your child. The
href=" http://www.msnbc.msn.com/Default.aspx?id=3990134&p1=0">example
given in the story is about a family with several sons and no
girls. The wife underwent a procedure in which several of her eggs
were fertilized in vitro (out of the womb), the sex of each embryo was
determined through pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), and three
of the determined female embryos were then implanted in the womb. The
other 14 fertilized embryos were discarded.
I'm a big fan of technology offering increased choices to
society, but I find this development somewhat troubling, and so should
feminists. While other cultures' preference for male children over
female children is widely documented and even goes as far as to
encourage infanticide on the occasion of a female birth, it's a
phenomena of which Western cultures are also guilty. The Atlantic
Monthly recently featured
a study by economists Gordon Dahl and Enrico Moretti that showed
that in the U.S., parents of girls are more likely to divorce than
parents of male children. They also found that males are more likely
to marry single mothers with a son than single mothers with a daughter.
Additionally, men are more likely to marry a woman if their unborn
child is determined to be male than if it is female.
Given fairly reasonable evidence of a bias towards having boys
rather than girls, are we facing a future in which women are reduced as
a proportion of the population through technology? This is something
I've also brought up regarding homosexuality in the past. Many gay
activists have rested their entire "civil rights" agenda on the fact
that homosexuality isn't a choice, but a biologically determined
condition. I definitely lean towards the latter explanation, but the
argument for determination is still moot. Still, the increasing
sophistication of reproductive technology might someday lead to the
pre-implanation genetic diagnosis of homosexuality, and then what? If
society is sub-consciously biased towards male children rather than
female and act upon that bias, what will become of unborn homosexual
embryos?
This seems counterintuitive, but liberals of the future
interested in an equitable and humane society may be the ones arguing
against unlimited reproductive choice.
Posted by Lexiphane at April 23, 2004 2:01 PM
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