Abortion and the Growing Sex-Selection Industry

Last week, someone sent me an online article carrying the headline, "Wealthy foreign couples coming to U.S. so they can select baby's sex". These couples, the story tells us, "are getting around laws banning sex selection in their home countries by coming to American soil where it's legal for medical procedures that can give them the boy, or girl, they want." The article is certainly worth a read, though it gives only passing mention to the the real ethical crisis which this new industry is creating. The main concern shouldn't be that U.S. clinics are giving parents the ability to "choose" the sex of their next child (they're really not). What they are doing is giving parents the ability to decide which one of their children is implanted and which ones are frozen, destroyed, or "donated for research" (which also destroys them). Ultimately, this is the same ugly backdrop that plagues the entire fertilization industry. Huge numbers of eggs are fertilized. Few are implanted, and unless a woman is going to have all of her fertilized eggs implanted, she is morally culpable for the embryos that are left to die.

The sex-selection angle only makes the industry more dubious, though perhaps it will bring further awareness to the multiplying dangers of increased genetic testing. One of most the amazing things about human development is that all of the genetic information necessary for a person's entire life is present from the moment of conception. This is what gives clinics the ability to determine if these tiny unformed bodies are male or female. Of course, it likely won't stop here. If parents, today, are deciding which children to keep based on their gender, will parents soon be making such decisions based on how tall their children will grow or what their eye or hair color will be? How about their genetic predisposition towards strength, intelligence or obesity? Ethically unchecked technical advances open all sorts of doors which should remain closed. Still, there is a silver lining. I came away from article marveling at the unfathomable knowledge and power of the One who created us all and who somehow inserts libraries of information (all that our bodies will ever need) into every human zygote.