Should prospective parents be able to determine their child’s gender?
A love to lead weekly discussion topic
No.
The beauty and intrinsic value of nature is in its random chance. To allow one set of parents to determine a child's gender is to start to define society along populist lines. Do we really want to create a fashion trend or a society where we can no longer celebrate our own individuality because we are all the same, predetermined at birth.
Can you imagine trend spotters on the news coming on saying this years must have baby is a boy with blue eyes and blonde hair. If we allow interference with natural selection of gender it will not stop at gender, it will be hair, height, mental abilities and other common variable.
It will become like a role playing computer games where you set up your characters starting characteristics such as charm and intelligence.
It will create armies of David Beckham's or Harry Potter's. Everyone will be the same just as today children have the same names, as they go in and out of fashion.
Children instead of a blessing will become a fashion accessory to show off to your friends.
The uniqueness that makes a person them can be based on their gender. Although there is equality of the sexes there will always be different ways of looking at things based on gender.
Take some historical figures, a female Einstein may well have been a great scientist in maybe a different field but they would not have been Einstein.
Take Margaret Thatcher, as a man he would have been a different leader with different views, would he have become the leader of the Tory party?
A person's opinions and actions are directly linked to their gender. This can both be a strength and a weakness for both genders, but just as twins can be exactly the same they will have different lives and personalities.
As well as the sociological factors there are also the scientific factors. Gender selection in the womb can be determined by changes in the external environment. As such should we really interfere, could we be putting our children at risk by deciding that we know better than nature?
In Summary
A child gender should not and can not be decided in the same way as we would choose a child's name.
To allow such selection would open up Pandora's box of children becoming the latest fashion accessory.
There are sometimes reasons why nature chooses one sex over the other, should we really interfere?
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3 comments:
Yes.
I am a man.
Something, call it fate, nature, god or what you will determined that I would be a man.
Would I be any less of a man, would I be harmed in any way if that something was my parents?
Well you might be a woman for a start.
All I'm saying is why should parents have the right to choose a child's sex except under medical reasons.
What justification is there for choosing a child's sex?
I wouldn't be a woman. My parents might have, 30 years ago, given birth to a baby girl, but that baby girl would not have grown up to be me.
The crucial issue is not, I believe, whether my being born a female rather than male would have harmed me.
The crux of the issue is whether I would be harmed if my being male was a result of my parents choice rather than random chance. I can't see that that would harm me, so I can't see any rational justification for not letting parents choose their baby's gender (assuming of course that the hypothetical technique to do so was effective and posed no risk to offspring or mother).
Although i will admit that my initial gut reaction to gender pre-determination is that of unease - distatste almost, I cannot find any rational justification for that unease.
Prospective parents with a history of haemophilia, or other sex-linked genetic disease have a very strong justification (one might even say obligation?) for choosing the sex of their child, should a safe and efficacious technique be available.
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