Can sex selection be ethically tolerated?

he urge to select children's sex is not new. The Babylonian Talmud, a Jewish text completed towards the end of the fifth century of the Christian era, advises couples on means to favour the birth of either a male or a female child. 1 The development of amniocentesis alerted the public in the mid-1970s to the scientific potential for prenatal determination of fetal sex, 2 and progressive decriminalisation of abortion afforded choice about continuation of pregnancy. The more recent emergence of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) obviates resort to abortion, and improved techniques of sperm sorting and diagnosis permit creation of zygotes that will ensure the sex of a future child. Growth of biomedical means to select the sex of future children has been accompanied by fear that such means will be employed to favour births of sons, and so perpetuate devaluation of girl children and women's inferior family and social status. A reaction to this fear has been the demand for legal and medical professional prohibition of sex selection techniques. For instance, the Council of Europe's Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine 3 provides in article 14 that: The use of techniques of medically assisted procreation shall not be allowed for the purpose of choosing a future child's sex, except where serious hereditary sex-related disease is to be avoided. Legislation has been enacted in a number of countries, and proposed in others, to prohibit sex selection on non-medical grounds, such as the Prena-tal Diagnostic Techniques (Regulation and Prevention of Misuse) Act, 1994 in India. In Canada, for instance, government draft legislation introduced in May 2002 proposes to make it a crime for any person, for the purpose of creating a human being, knowingly to: perform any procedure or provide, prescribe or administer any thing that would ensure or increase the probability that an embryo will be of a particular sex, or that would identify the sex of an in vitro embryo, except to prevent, diagnose or treat a sex linked disorder or disease. 4 In light of evidence from India, China, and other countries and cultures in which son preference is apparent, many analysts and commentators have envisioned the use of techniques of sex selection only as reinforcing male dominated sexism and women's subordina-tion. New reproductive techniques and technologies have always triggered fears of unnatural, harmful outcomes, social disruption, and destruction of conventional families. In the mid-1960s, addressing human reproduction …