...choosing a baby’s sex for social reasons may be acceptable and that there is no evidence it harms individuals or society.

One almost feels a society deserves to suffer for moral blindness of this magnitude.

"(there won't be many girls, of course)"

A field day for contrarians. I still like my idea about rescuing baby girls in China.

Has anyone considered the psychological effects on these children once they grow up? How many will feel they are their "own person" when they were specifically designed to fulfill another person's wishes?

The British have decided not to adopt the slow-lane approach of their Continental neighbors but are instead looking for the TGV or Concorde to oblivion. No great loss.

There's one way sex selection would be OK with me: if the resulting gender ratio was the same as it would have been without sex selection. In short (and simplifying the ratio for now), each couple who wants a boy gets one, as long another couple gets a girl. If too many people want a boy, either they pay other couples to have a girl or they just take their chances the old-fashioned way.

I read an article on this subject last year (apologies, no cite)

Sex selection is available now. As it turns out, virtually always couples do so to balance families.

Which means girls are chosen as often as boys.

So they tell interviewers...

If boy babies outnumber girl babies, parents who want to be grandparents will try to have more girl babies. It will eventually even out.

Joseph:

No they don't. It just provokes wars.:

http://chronicle.com/free/v50/i34/34a01401.htm

Jeff: What do they choose first?

Of course, once you have the right to an abortion, you have the right to abort girls.

in the u.s. (i read) couples tend to choose the sex of second and folllowing children; in india and china they inevitably choose boys.

good by gay people, once that test is available.

cjm:

Thus the exquisite irony of gay pro-life activists:

http://www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/08.14.97/gay-prolife-9733.html

C.S.Lewis 1949
In reality, of course if any one age really attains, by eugenics and scientific education, the power to make its descendants what it pleases, all men who live after it are the patients of that power. They are weaker, not stronger.

The final stage is to come when Man by eugenics, by pre-natal conditioning, and by an education and psychology, has obtained full control over himself. Human nature will be the last part of Nature to surrender to Man. The battle will then be won.

For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means, as we have seen, the power of some men to make other men what they please.

Nor are their subjects necessarily unhappy men. They are not men at all: they are artefacts. Man's final conquest has proved to be the abolition of Man.