Do you think it is appropriate to select the sex of a child?

Anonymous

If yôu have the option to do so but I'm not aware of such an optiôn existing as of yet maybe sôôn.

megalomaniac

No. And this issue is only going to get worse because we can now select gene editing on all kinds of things if we want to. I don't trust human judgement enough to do that. We have great intelligence but low wisdom when it comes to these kinds of things.

luv2be.evil

I have to admit I wanted to at one time. After my wife and I had our second daughter, I was wondering if we should make sure we'd have a boy too. We couldn't afford it anyway and after our third child was another girl, we just gave up. I don't need a boy and I love my girls, it would have been nice to have one of each...oh well.

Ranchmom1

No.

Edna

It's impossible to "select" the sex of a child outside a highly-sophisticated lab (which doesn't even exist now). Each sperm would have to be tested in order to see whether it contained the "X" sex chromosome (girl) or the "Y" sex chromosome (boy); and you would select which one you wanted. Then you would have to hope that the lab tests were correct in their prediction.

LizB

I did. For our second child we did IVF with PGS, and one of the potential "perks" of PGS is that parents can possible select by sex which embryos they wish to try first. Not all clinics offer this, and those that do generally ONLY offer it if the couple already has at least one child. We already had a son (conceived via IUI) and so decided we wanted to try the female embryos first. We wound up with three genetically normal female embryos and one normal male, so we tried the girls first. It was girl #3 that worked. If we had gone by embryo quality instead of chromosomal sex, the girls still would have been first since they were all graded higher than the male embryo.

Anonymous

Only if it meant eradicating a serious health problem. Otherwise, it's a bad idea to start manipulating a natural process. It's possible to think the world could become even more male-driven, and nothing good will come out of that.

Anonymous

that is effectively what legalized abortion permits. a woman can abort her fetus for any reason, even if it's simply because the baby isn't a female. in china, the one-child policy led to a shortage of female babies because parents wanted a son and aborted their female fetuses. in the west, women favoring daughters are aborting their male fetuses and leading to a shortage of male babies.