The New Eugenics: Sex Testing of 6-Week Embryos
The new eugenics forges ahead with a new "home" test soon to be available to determine an embryo's gender at 6 weeks development. (Ultrasound permits gender identification at about 20 weeks.) Why the need to know the sex--this isn't about disease--so early? I can think of only one main reason: If you want a boy and it's a girl--or probably less frequently, the other way around--then there is plenty of time to have a eugenic abortion and start again. From the story:
But some health authorities have already stopped revealing that information for fear of "wrong-sex" terminations...Wrong-sex abortions are more common in some ethnic minorities--with boys being more highly prized than girls.But now with the home test, people who don't want a little girl or boy can find out early enough to destroy their daughter or son--with no one the wiser. So much for loving the child we conceive unconditionally. We apparently are moving into an era in which we not only have a right to have a child, but to have the child we want. We should call this the solipsistic era. All that seems to matter any more is, "I want."
Labels: Sex Selection
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 9:53 PM
19 Comments
19 Comments:
Assuming the technology were feasible, do you think it's ethical to screen sperm for carrying either the X or Y chromosome?
I wouldn't like it, but it would not be nearly the same as destroying a living and developing embry/fetus because of its gender.
Why this urge to hyper control? I understand illness, but gender isn't an illness. And since most of those not selected to be used in fertilization would have Y chromosomes (let's be realistic here), it would perpetuate sexist notions of female less desirability and even inferiority, wouldn't it?
Normally I am favor of people being able to make choices about what sort of children they choose to carry to term. If people want boys or girls, or blonds or brunettes or whatever, they should be able to.
However, sex selection has disturbing social consequences. If a population has a greater proportion of males to females, that can produce social unrest due to the large number of males who can't find a mate, leading to increased pressure for wars, and greater sexism as women become a scare commodity. This is a real problem in China and India. India has tried to outlaw gender-based abortion with little success.
Not sure it leads to wars, but it does undermine universal human equality.
They can sort sperm by sex already, in a centrifuge (XX is heavier than XY). Many IVF clinics offer the service to "balance" families, and sometimes even for a first child. Most gay couples that use IVF also avail themselves of the ability to choose their child's sex when the service is offered.
There's also the rare X-linked disease. But, for the most part, it's better to take what you get.
John Howard: This isn't a "gay" or a "straight" issue. It is a hyper-control issue, which I am coming to believe is a neurosis of the times. Moreover, I believe it should be a feminist issue since most of the aborted babies/fetuses will be girls.
I didn't say it was a gay or straight issue, I was just alerting you to the fact that sex selection was going on already, since you seemed to be under the impression that it wasn't yet. I didnt want to imply that most couples chose their baby's sex when all I know about is this:
Three quarters of gay couples using the clinic are now also opting to select their child's sex, with 60 percent of them choosing a boy. This incurs an additional fee above the $60,000 cost of the programme itself.
Maybe that's true of straight couples too, but I don't know, it doesn't say.
I knew sex selection was going on. This is a new form.
I think this contributes more to the objectification of human beings. We use people and love things.
Maybe we can't force people to be gracious or have gratitude, but all of us have something wrong with us that could have been a ground(s) today to justify aborting us, but we all escaped the most dangerous place in the United States, a womb-a virtual open season on unborn humans, and now we have rights because our umbilical cords have been cut. Some grounding for human rights that is.
It is contemptable to me that we who have escaped the womb with our imperfections can turn around and refuse others entrance into our society because they do not meet OUR standards or specifications, they are not what we want, would be inconvenient and etc. What's more blasphemous is how we who would reject unborn children for how they would inconvenience us or not meet our standards will turn around and complain when others treat us the same way. What a joke.
My mother died of cancer at 59. Had the technology been available then, someone could have suggested to my grandmother that my mother's genetics posed a higher risk for cancer and maybe grandma should end my mom's life in utero so she would not be a risk of burdening my grandparents, society or my mother herself. I can think of 16 reasons why that would be an intrinsically evil idea-my brothers, our wives and kids.
I'm sickened by the self centeredness and the devaluation of human beings that flows from this. I'm sickened by the way it also has to evaluate and lead to a subjective estimation/esteeming of human beings based on their characteristics.
No one should be surprised the abortion feminists don't care about the killing of girls in utero. They care about themselves and their self perceived god given right not to have their lives interupted by anyone or anything, even if it means being quiet in the presence of the slaughter of baby girls.
Right, this is after conception, that's true. I see it was Royale who didn't know we were already doing sperm sorting in the US. "Almost every country apert from the US" has outlawed sex selection.
I've heard they have developed early prenatal paternity tests, which will also have a huge impapct not only on abortions if it was the wrong man's, but also on marriages and breakups, if people could know who the father was very early in a pregnancy.
Actually feminists DO care about abortion for sex-selection, and many oppose it.
But, hey, Don, you just revealed your opposition to abortion has nothing whatever to do with the fetus; you care about only about "selfish" women refusing to have the babies you want. These women reject the old double standard you and your type so worship and reject the notion women are too stupid to do anything else but have sex and have babies.
At bottom the abortion debate was NEVER about the status of the fetus, which was always bogus; it has EVERYTHING to do with how we value women in our society.
Susan: "At bottom the abortion debate was NEVER about the status of the fetus, which was always bogus; it has EVERYTHING to do with how we value women in our society."
Maybe that's what the abortion debate is about for you, Susan. You need not extrapolate that to the rest of us.
Susan,
Nice try. Classic case of projection. Thanks for the affirmation once again that your movement has no gas left in the tank.
Some of my good friends have 8 and 9 kids. My sister in law has 5. My mom wanted 6 boys, but settled for 4. After her divorce she raised us by herself, with the help of our church and extended family.
I'm offended by your condescending
insinuation that women like them are nothing more than baby factories and too stupid to do anything else and that to devote themselves so completely to children means they are not fulfilling their full potential as women. My mother's self sacrifice for us guys made her much more of a fully human fully alive fully actualized human being than all the law degrees Ruth Bader Ginsburg has collected.
The utter nonsense of the abortion feminist and their self preoccupation makes it no wonder young women are rejecting abortion feminism. It would be worth a laugh if it didn't affect real people.
Susan, Don's original comment didn't actually single out women for making him sick, he was talking about anyone who would reject unborn children for an imperfection. If the person in control of that decision is a man, I'm sure he would be equally sickened, and maybe in that case, you would be too. Can you imagine going for IVF and having two embryos created, but then having a doctor tell you that they threw them both out because they had some genetic imperfection or were the wrong sex? It wouldn't matter what the sex of that doctor was. You'd mainly feel upset that your babies were killed, but you'd also feel violated by the doctor that made that decision unilaterally and took your reproductive choice away from you. But that wouldn't mean that didn't value doctors.
While we're imagining things, imagine your two embryos are healthy and perfect, but you've just broken up or lost your job or met a new partner, so you don't want to implant them anymore. But then someone calls you up and tells you they took them and implanted them in their (artificial?) womb, and your going to be a mom in 8 months! It wouldn't really matter what sex that person was, would it? In this case, you'd be upset purely because someone else is controlling your reproduction and giving you no choice about it.
Similarly, the real crime of rape is seizing control of someone's reproduction, taking their whole future, which is why it is understood to be about power, not lust. It is usually a man taking control of a woman's reproduction, but it doesn't have to be. Being against rape does not devalue men, it devalues people who would seize control of someone's reproductive choice.
Reproduction should be consensual, no one person should have control over another person's reproduction.
Hey Don, I fed in all the data and ran the simulation, and it turns out that if your mother had been aborted, your dad would have married Sally Smith* and had six wonderful children (one of them would have come up with the cure for cancer in 2003). You wouldn't have been one of their kids, though, you would have wound up being born into a very nice Puerto Rican family (your brother was in the original Menudo!)
*no relation to Wesley, who it turns out would have been born to a family in South Korea and would currently be a geneticist... Damn! I'd have been Italian! Your mom though, wouldn't have gotten to see the light of day at all.
Sorry, this off-topic joke is running long, but I do seriously think it is preferable to believe that babies never conceived by one couple are not missing. The same soul that might have entered one couple's child if a conception occured, instead ensouls another baby that is conceived somewhere else on earth. I think it is better to imagine that our consciousness could just as easily be looking out of the eyes of anyone else in the world, instead of feeling that we could only be the person we happen to be. We wouldn't have the same personality in some other body, our personality comes from our surroundings. Nothing about us comes from our soul, all our souls are the same.
John,
You are definitely better at math and genetic speculation than I am! Your joke reminds me of when I was kid and wondered what I'd be if my mom and dad hadn't met. Thanks. Now I know.
But then maybe I would have been like my cousin's kids. My cousin was adopted out of a Korean orphanage and she married my best golf partner, an African American attorney. Her kids (my niece and nephews) are so precious. I was going in to do a broadcast a few years ago on the verge of the Senate vote for partial birth abortion when she called me on the way to say that her unborn son (their thrid child) might have a cyst on his lungs and would I pray for the little guy.
I couldn't help thinking how crazy it was that she and her husband were going to do everything to save this little guy no matter what he would be like and on another floor in that Bay Area hospital there would be someone throwing away their baby because he or she would have been an incovenience and hence of no value. I shudder to think how less full my life would have been if my cousin had been aborted or because her parents didn't want her, cut down shortly after birth. Thank God she wasn't.
I can't imagine Wesley being anything other than he is.
You are right that I am against the whole culture that objectifies human beings and as a result rejects human beings in utero and ex utero based on a person's characteristics. It's odd to me that the same people doing the rejection so often are upset with others for doing what they have done to others.
AND, there is a warning flag down on the field: Don and Susan: Please do not move this interesting discussion into the legality of abortion, generally. This post is about eugenics manipulations and sex selection.
Thank you.
Carry on.
Guess what I just watched - the original Stepford Wives!
((Warning - do NOT watch the 2004 re-make unless you like un-funny comedy that sucks and has no plot value, and plot holes big enough to drive a Mac truck through.))
ANYWAY!
Here you have a town where all the women are traded in for versions of themselves that like to cook, clean, raise children, and make the guys feel sexy, and all they have to give up in exchange is their personality, their own desires, and their own selves.
So now we come to gender selection of the unborn. Heavy. Some guys (not any I know personally) like having sons over daughters 'cause there's something "manly" about strutting around and showing off little copies of themselves so they can sing praises about their bedroom prowess. All they need in exchange for feeling all manly is to kill off anything with double Xes before it can settle, or else create nothing but boy embroys.
Now you've got a feminist who says, "Women want to feel empowered, and this has nothing to do with the embryo."
Let's look at the statistics - most women who have abortions either are single women who don't want/can't afford babies, or are married/partnered women who don't want certain types of babies.
About those married women - how much influence do you think their hubbies and boyfriends exert over them when they're emotional, hormonal, and unhappy, everything's hurting, and they find out the baby ain't gonna be perfect?
I only know of two abortion cases personally. One was my sister-in-law and brother - my brother told my SIL that he didn't want to have another kid while he was looking for a better job. She aborted when he talked her around to it.
The second was a former friend of mine, who's girl got pregnant and he talked her into having an abortion because the two of them "needed to settle in" before they could consider having a kid, and then he left her shortly thereafter because, and I quote, "I just wasn't having any fun with her. She wasn't good enough for me."
I can't make a scientific sampling from this small group of two examples, so I can't say how much good this is doing, but in both cases it was the guy who initiated the idea of abortion and had to talk the woman around quickly. Neither woman wanted to abort initially and neither one was happy with the decision afterward.
I *would* like to see a scientific sampling of anonymous couples that have aborted to see what influence the man had over the woman, why he chose to exert that influence, and the woman's opinion afterward.
Almost all the guys I know like having ladies in their lives who are independent and strong-willed, but I wonder how many guys out there would rather have someone easily programmed to play both mate and mama to them, and to get rid of anything that's not convinent. And I wonder how many guys think their kids are an inconvinence, and would want their wives to have no lives outside the house, or else to have abortions, just because they don't like being inconvienced by having to be responsible.
By the way - Rent the original Stepford Wives movie - it ROCKS!
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