Ethical Issues on Gender Selection

There are three core motivations for engaging in sex determination and sex or gender selection: Medical reasons - such as preventing the birth of children affected or at risk of X-linked disorders. Family balancing reasons - here couples choose to have a child of one sex because they already have one or more children of the other sex. Gender preference reasons - often in favour of male offspring stemming from cultural, social, and economic bias in favour of male children and as a result of policies requiring couples to limit reproduction to one child, as in China.

Some people believe that gender selection for non-medical reasons raises serious moral, legal, and social issues. The principal concerns are that the practice of gender selection will

1. distort the natural male to female ratio leading to a gender imbalance and
2. reinforce discriminatory and sexist stereotypes towards women by devaluing females.
   

Other people think that it could be unethical only to offer a method of sperm sorting to select the sex of the baby.

On the other hand, some people are really concerned in what they consider the illegal art of discarding "potential babies" or the unnecessary creation of more embryos for fertility treatments than is needed. In fact, the statements of such ethicist dueling make an individual an "ethicist" agreeing and disagreeing with any of them.

Since there is no career or training to become a "professional" in ethics, this is more likely a moral matter based on each individual's information about the facts involved with gender selection. Perhaps a decision may defer to that coming from an ethicist, but how can someone know whether a person can qualify as expert or authority in ethics?

Accepting gender selection could just like accepting freedom of speech. If a couple choose to select the gender of their offspring then they should not be concerned about society and society should not discriminate any child, or label them as so-called designer babies. The fact is that other than creating some ethical guidelines in gender selection, no one has enough authority to say what is right or wrong in bay gender selection.

Countries prohitbit gender selection (2009)

Country	Region	Policy
Austria	Europe	prohibited
Australia	Oceania	social uses prohibited
Belgium	Europe	social uses prohibited
Bosnia & Harzegovina	Europe	social uses prohibited
Bulgaria	Europe	social uses prohibited
Canada	North America	social uses prohibited
China	Asia	social uses prohibited
Croatia	Europe	social uses prohibited
Cyprus	Asia	social uses prohibited
Czech Republic	Europe	social uses prohibited
Denmark	Europe	social uses prohibited
Estonia	Europe	social uses prohibited
Finland	Europe	social uses prohibited
France	Europe	social uses prohibited
Germany	Europe	social uses prohibited
Greece	Europe	social uses prohibited
Hungary	Europe	social uses prohibited
Iceland	Europe	social uses prohibited
India	Asia	social uses prohibited
Israel	Asia	social uses prohibited
Italy	Europe	social uses prohibited
Latvia	Europe	social uses prohibited
Lithuania	Europe	social uses prohibited
Netherlands	Europe	social uses prohibited
New Zealand	Oceania	prohibited
Norway	Europe	social uses prohibited
Portugal	Europe	social uses prohibited
Russia	Europe	social uses prohibited
Singapore	Asia	social uses prohibited
South Korea	Asia	prohibited
Spain	Europe	social uses prohibited
Switzerland	Europe	prohibited
Turkey	Asia	social uses prohibited
United Kingdom	Europe	social uses prohibited
Vietnam	Asia	prohibited

Data from BioPolicy Wiki