If couples have the reproductive freedom to choose how many children to have and when to have them, and to terminate unwanted pregnancies, then why should they not also have the freedom to select the sex of their child if they can do so?
Oomman and Ganatra are worried that preconception sex selection will cause an unbalanced sex ratio. In reality, preconception sex selection will allow couples to balance the sex ratio in their own families Citation[1]. For example, take a couple with a baby girl, who want to have a second baby. If they leave things up to chance, half of them will have a second baby girl – causing unbalanced intra-family sex ratios. Preconception sex selection will allow them to make sure that they have a balanced sex ratio in their family, if they so desire.
What will the effect be on the population level? The argument that women will get wiped out in a few generations because of skewed sex ratios produced by selection pressure for boys holds little water. It is based on highly distorted figures which are used to create a sensationalistic impact by presenting them out of context. Let us analyse the study which showed that 430 of the 450 women in an urban clinic in India who were told that the sex of the baby was female went on to have an abortion Citation[2]. It is important to remember that most couples who go through sex determination have at least one or more girls (often 3–4) before they decide to take matters in their own hands because they have got fed up of leaving everything up to chance. These couples are not representative of the population, and therefore extrapolating these figures to the entire populace makes absolutely no sense.
In India, as long as sons are synonymous with economic and social benefits, people will continue resorting to sex selection against girls, and this is a very rational and sensible decision from their personal point of view. After all, Indians are not stupid; they are not going to spend their hard-earned money on a procedure such as sex selection, unless they think they are going to benefit from it. We need to give credit to people's intelligence, and allow them to make choices for themselves, rather than presume that only health activists, feminists, politicians or lawyers have the requisite sense to decide what is best for everyone else.
It always amazes me how little we have learnt from the failure of our family planning programmes. Couples in the West started restricting family size not because they were worried about a global population explosion, but because it started becoming too expensive for them to have too many children. What happened when the programme was transplanted to India? The only people willing to adopt a small family norm were the affluent, whose conditions were very similar to those in the West. For the poor Indian farmer, where every child was an additional source of income, it continued to make economic sense to have many children, and he continued to do so, in spite of millions of rupees spent on government propaganda. After all, one more mouth to feed meant two more hands to earn. The lesson is clear – reproductive choices are very personal decisions which each individual makes to maximise his or her own benefit, and it ultimately boils down to a question of economics in the end, not sexism or discrimination against females.
In fact, families who achieve their desired boy after preconception sex selection will not have to go on reproducing, and so obtain more unwanted children of the undesired sex. In fact, preconception sex selection can be considered to be the ultimate form of family planning.
After all, if we allow adoptive parents to select the sex of their baby, then why not allow other couples to do so as well? Not allowing a couple access to sex selection is, after all, an encroachment on their personal rights, and I would argue that it is unethical to prevent them from using the technology if it is available, by asking them to sacrifice their personal desires at the altar of a hypothetical utopian society, where the sex ratio is an “ideal” 1:1.
Oomman and Ganatra conclude by saying: “If the ultimate desire is to have a healthy child, we do not believe that selection on the basis of any criteria, sex or otherwise (excluding genetic and congenital disorders) is justified.” Their argument seems to be that it is acceptable to discriminate against children with birth defects (negative deselection), but it is not acceptable to select for certain desirable traits (positive selection). I find this hard to understand. After all, the reason we select our spouses is that they have certain traits we place a premium on (intelligence or good looks), and we then hope that our children will inherit these qualities. Vive la difference. The best society is one where individuals have the freedom to decide their own course of action for themselves.
References
- A. Malpani, A. Malpani, D. Modi. Preimplantation sex selection for family balancing in India. Hum. Reprod. 17(1): 1992; 11–12.
- A. Ramanama, U. Bambawale. The mania for sons: an analysis of social values in South Asia. Soc. Sci. Med. 14B(2): 1980; 107–110.