Choose The Sex of Your Baby?

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Well it's all over the news. But it seems its going to get the go ahead for choice of sex for your baby, a kind of cloning in some ways.

It's stupid if you ask me, you should love what you're lucky enough to have, if it's a boy or girl who cares longs it's healthy.

I don't like the idea of humans constantly tinkering with nature. Sooner or later, it's going to have some serious repercusions.

What do you think?

 

Well, I don't really like the idea - but I have no idea why not. Rationally it's a great idea - gets rid of the unwanted gender problem and whatnot ... but I guess I don't feel like thinking rationally, and that people want to change their children's genders kinda annoys me.

 

Options are always good and I don't see any reason why to limit them. True, in China it is a serious problem when everyone wants a cute little baby-boy rather than a cute little baby-girl, but that is a problem in culture. In Europe, it shouldn't break that 50/50 ratio too much...

 

Hmmm, I was really hoping that Marcus was going to be a girl - but only at first. I was actually kind of relieved whenI learned that I was having Son #2. I mean, I have something of a clue as to how to raise a boy, but little girls are kind of to me at this point. Had I had the choice before he was conceived, I might have made a terrible mistake.

 

The question of choice is not quite as simple as Barmy has made out here. Here are some details:

1) This relates exclusively to IVF treatment, not some miraculous new scientific way of natural conception with choice enabled. The sex can be determined when the embryo is 5 days old, and thus one can chose which ones to implant.

2) It is proposed to allow the choice of sex of the embryo to be implanted on grounds of 'family balancing'. It is already allowed on health grounds, for example where one sex is likely to have a genetic problem. In other words, there has to be a reason over and above the "We want a son / daughter"

3) The proposal is likely to have a caviat of at least two other children of the same sex already within the family.

Now what does that all mean?

Well, formost it means going through an IVF program which is not exactlly something to be done lightly, particularly not for any reason other than not being able to conceive naturally.

To be fair, all the arguments against it seems to have centred around the impact it might have on the child in later life. In other words, there is no scientific reason for not allowing this.

I can see the argument for letting some people chose like this, and it would certainly be preferable to say terminating the pregnancy after 12 weeks + (Sex can be determined at approx 12 weeks), if it's the 'wrong' sex. Since I don't have any children yet it's hard to say if I would ever want to chose, but I can see why some people might.

 

I would just love to see it in India. I know it's limited to IVF, but if it was possible to determine the child's gender in normal conception, India would die out in one generation—everyone would want to have boys, and there would be no girls for those boys to ever marry. End of story

 

Yeah, I agree with Barmy. Tinkering with nature all the time is bound to have serious repercussions sooner or later. I heard some claims like the child's gender depends on what his mother eats during pregnancy. If true, that would be quite a natural way of getting a boy or girl when you want one.

 

One thing occured to my fiancee when I've told her of this thread, and she commented (I agree with her totally):
"If it can be said what gender the child is on the fifth day after conception (and there is nothing happening between conception and that fifth day!), it could be said the moment after conception. And if that isn't proof that the fertilised egg is not already a human being, then what is?"

 

Yeah, when my parents were pregnant with their first 3 kids (there're 6 of us and I'm the eldest), whenever somebody would ask them if they wanted a boy or girl they'd say "We don't care, as long as it's normal".

 

I believe that the sex of a person is determined at the moment of conception, when the zygote is formed (eggs are X sex chromosomes, sperm are either X or Y; XY - male, XX - female).

Asides from that - well, I would say that we humans have been tinkering around with nature for millennia, albeit on a much cruder way. For example, we breed certain dogs, horses, and cattle to make stronger, faster, meatier, fluffier animals. The worst we've gotten from that is probably Africanized killer bees. For humans, you can determine through basic hereditary charts if your kids will have something like Tay-Sachs and color blindness; in fact, there have already been councils that tell couples the chances of their kids having certain conditions.