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UK Report Suggests Designer Offspring
chromakey writes "Several news agencies are reporting that the UK is considering allowing parents undergoing fertility treatment to select the sex of their unborn babies." Also covered in Q&A format by the BBC. From the article: "At the moment in the UK, sex selection is only permitted if there are strict medical reasons. This could be because there is a serious sex-linked disorder in the family, such as Duchenne's Muscular Dystrophy."
China already has a problem with this already. Due to their one-child policy, many families had sex-based abortions. In particular, since sons were much more popular, they would abort daughters. Now, China has about 120 men for every 100 women.
This might not seem like such a serious problem on the surface, but it really is. Among other things, China now has an extremely active underground wife selling system, in comparison to other countries, at least. Since there just aren't enough Chinese women to go around, men are willing to break laws and pay high prices to get a wives.
It seems like that the difference in population also makes discrimination more likely. There's no clear evidence on how the discrimination would work out, but discrimination is usually more common in disparate populations.
Just to be a Devil's Advocate, I can think of at least one reason. That would be the inevitable inbalance that would occur in the sexes. In China right now, with it's one-child policy, there is a large inbalance in the number of male versus female children. There will be thousands (millions?) of young Chinese men that will not be able to find a mate, simply because there aren't enough women around.
The inability these men will have in finding a mate could have huge negative consequences for the entire Chinese Society. These negative consequences would be one reason why government should be able to prevent you from choosing a male over a female child.
In developing countries, there is already a serious imbalance in male/female ratio, with about 800-900 females per 1000 males. Fortunately, the trend is a little bit reversed in developed countries. If the designer babies techniques come to developing countries, it will further push the female/male ratio down.
One would assume that with fewer women, the women will have additional power, but in male-dominated societies (in many developing countries), lower number of women may in fact lead to more oppression of women (they may end up viewed as "precious property").
It is very scary.
S
It's happening in China. One child -- it had better be a boy to carry on the familiy name.
There are some potentially severe consequences to increasing the male population. One is that we can anticipate that a country with surplus males may well choose to be militarily more aggressive, since male cannon fodder will be a relatively low value commodity.
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