Engendering Harm: A Critique of Sex Selection For “Family Balancing”

There is a notable exception to this trend. In the United States, most of those using Microsort sperm sorting request a female embryo. However, the reason for this is likely to be linked to the fact that Microsort promises higher success rates for female embryos: a 91 per cent success rate, compared with a 76 per cent success rate for males (Grady 2007). A 2011 survey by U.S.-based research consultancy Gallup Inc. found that if only permitted to have one child, 40 per cent of participants would prefer a son and 28 per cent a daughter (Newport 2011).

Consider that sons will have higher lifetime earnings, have access to a wider range of professional opportunities, will not incur dowry payments (where relevant), will in most cases keep the family name, are unlikely to be subject to sexual and/or domestic violence, etc.

The requirements have since changed and, reassuringly, no longer require the couple to be married, but I include McMillan’s endorsement since he presumably agreed with this additional requirement, given that the requirement still applied at the time of the paper’s publication. I do so in order to demonstrate a prejudice towards heteronormativity within the provision of reproductive technologies themselves, and amongst many interlocutors who uncritically endorse them.

In institutional settings, chromosomal sex may play a role, but that is a very different discussion, which I take up in section 5.

I say “in the first instance” because some of the most influential and robust gendering of small children will be enacted by influences outside the home and will likely happen in spite of parents’ aspirations towards gender-neutral parenting. That is “prospective sex selectors must make their decisions in the real social world, an environment that may well be sexist and which will almost certainly impact on future children’s characters whether the parents like it or not” (Wilkinson 2008, 387). One then might argue the following: I don’t intend to gender my children, but I know that they will likely nonetheless end up gendered in accordance with how their sexed-bodies are construed. I do not want a child who might be violent, thoughtless, and irresponsible, as young men are often socialized to be, and I do not feel that my parenting can offset this powerful norm. I am therefore selecting a female child. This is an important argument, but note that it does nothing to undermine arguments against sex selection for family balancing specifically, since parents who want variably gendered children are likely to encourage gendered properties alongside, and in accordance with, external influences.

Sparrow (2013) carefully considers the ethics of the inverse situation: that of selecting against intersex chromosomes, carefully weighing the virtue of challenging the sex binary by resisting the reduction of the intersex population against the cost of personal suffering (to parents and children) due to the marginalization of non-normative genitals. He makes the important point that the “political project of combating such injustices, seems to demand that parents sacrifice the interests of their children for the sake of the larger social good” (34). I find this point compelling and uncomfortable (as does he) but do not have space to explore it further here.