Sex selection: regulating technology enabling the predetermination of a child's gender.

As technology allowing preselection of a child's gender has improved, observers have debated whether such practices should be prohibited. With sex selection, as with many issues of emotional appeal, political positions have antedated careful reflection, and legislative initiatives have marched well in advance of strategic planning. As a result, groups at either extreme of the issue have captured the critical thinking on the subject. The debate over the prohibition o f sex (or gender) selection (also known as "preselection" or "predetermination"), has focused almost exclusively on the context o f aborting a "wrong-sex" fetus after a fetal gender-identification procedure. Despite the fact that sex selection abortions represent only a small subset of sex selection procedures, attitudes toward the tbrmer are driving general policy approaches to the latter. However, the issues are analytically distinct, and only during the former infancy of the pre-conceptive (and non-abortive post-conceptive) technology for sex selection were members on both sides of the debate afforded the economy of using one logic to support views on two issues. Consequently, the subsequent dramatic advances in sperm separation and artificial insemination technology challenge this unstable consolidation of views and require the context-specific division of the emotional reactions, analytic reasoning, and societal responses. Divided by a line separating their resultant positions, commentators have grouped themselves into prohibitionists and non-interventionists. Yet a different division, along the perpendicular line separating them by their methods o f analysis, would yield two different groups: those for