Should you be allowed to choose the sex of your baby?

If every couple decides it's better to have girls than boys and there is a population shift - overall the population would be reduced over time, which wouldn't be a bad thing ... The inequality in numbers might mean some lezzing up would be necessary though... But maybe the gay gene could be inserted in a few to keep everyone happy.

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Maybe in cultures where a male baby is prized to the extent that girls are sometime killed after birth this would be a problem.
..It may save some girls from getting killed, innit?

Obviously it will be chosen by parents whose genes may pose a risk of heriditary illness, but imagine the boy you chose NOT to have in favour of a girl may have grown up to invent the cure for cancer, and your longed for frilly dressed girl becomes a crack addled gangsta ho smelling up your neighbourhood? Goes too deep man....

Ah, THERE you are!

But really, what's the matter with that? (aside from everyone eventually looking exactly alike.)

FWIW, I wouldn't genetically engineer my kid - I'd prefer that it work as nature makes it work - (although it'a little late for that, with the amount of chemicals & hormones we've been artificially exposed to in the last 100 years.)

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I'm not sure I would support a blanket ban on couples choosing the sex of their children. I suppose it wouldn't bug me if a couple with two boys decided on a third and last girl, but it could easily lead to some very chauvinistic family eugenics.

Yet.

Good point though, about slippery slope & all .. but that presumes that the ability to spit venom is generally undesirable.

The libertarian in me says, 'yes', but then I wonder why any civilized person would care what sex their child was.
One of the reasons I won't have children is that I'm very afraid of having a son. The male Beverlys pretty much want each other dead, you see...:
My grandfather hates his father for putting him up for adoption and never was concerned about my brother and I until he started feeling lonely after his second wife died, and so I never met him until I was ten.
My father hates my grandfather, his brother, my brother and I.
My brother and I hate our father, could care less about our grandfather, and haven't an opinion on our uncle (but thank goodness he's had a daughter).
My uncle tolerates my grandfather out of obedience but I'm sure he really loathes him at heart, probably pities my brother, and I don't think he has an opinion on my brother and I since we haven't seen him in years.

But shaky family relations are why (if I wanted to have children and could ever afford it) I'd want a daughter. I'm worried I'll turn into something wretched like my father or my grandfather and hurt my son and have him loathe me. I don't think I'd be so cruel to my daughter. However, I don't want children of my own general and find spawning unnecessary. Maybe I'll adopt in the future...

I may be staunchly pro-choice but it's not because I believe the State has 0% interest in regards to childbirth and maternal health, only that the rights of individuals with regard to their own bodies must be considered paramount. In respect to luxuries and vanities like choosing sex or eye color, I think I might have to look at the equation again to determine whether I really thought the interest of the State in maintaining equality was not compelling enough to override an individual's right. One cannot engage in much body manipulation of children in this country, though tellingly, as we discuss often enough, male circumcision is not on the list of proscribed practices, so why not also protect the fetus from daddy's selfish wish to have a boy to play ball with or mommy's desire for a little doll to dress up. Might not the State be considered to have a compelling interest if the lack of legislation permitted the breeding of a physically distinct caste of the wealthiest while the poor were left with all the occasional deformities and diseases bequeathed by history?

tell me you're not against people having physical deformities operated on because they're merely "favoring the fetishized traits of the parental-generation." cuz that's what your paragraph reads like.

Much of what makes me uncomfortable is the idea that the born child will have been objectified by the loony wishes of its 'creators', or in the Kantian sense, they will have treated their child not as an end itself but as a means to an end, especially when that 'end' is something as politically farught with peril as sex or as full of shallow folly as eye or hair color.

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Of course they are but should this be encouraged, considered morally neutral, or discouraged and by what means socially, legally...it's really the gist of this debate/discussion.

I'm agnostically Christian and pro-choice, but I've always kind of thought of children as gifts from God in that you don't know what you're getting and you just have to deal with it. Same with the death penalty, it seems wrong and hubristic to mess with it.

This is the sort of slippery slope argument that is usually brought up by those who think that "designer babies" are a bad thing. But I tend to think that it's flawed and self-contradictory. First off, why should the state be interested in making certain that everyone start off equal? And if the second place, no one starts off equal now anyway. Does it really matter if it's "nature" or "heredity" or "the parent's choice" that's the source?

As for sex selection in general, this has been going on for ages in various cultures (generally through infanticide, but also through awareness of ovulation--female sperm last longer but male sperm are faster. or so the theory goes). And yes, sometimes it does have interesting social implications. Maybe 20 years down the line we will all be practicing polyandry. Who cares?

Some families have a history of certain sex-linked hereditary disorders. However, I have no idea what percentage of couples interested in sex selection fall into this category.