Hum. Reprod. Advance Access originally published online on October 23, 2006
Human Reproduction 2006 21(12):3303-3304; doi:10.1093/humrep/del348
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Letter to the Editor |
Reply: Evolution, morality and the law: on Valerie J. Grant’s case against sex selection
Department of Psychological Medicine, Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences, University of Auckland, Private Bag 92019, Auckland, New Zealand
E-mail: vj.grant{at}auckland.ac.nz
Sir,
In offering my article for publication (Grant, 2006
), I was making a tentative suggestion to defer the decision on whether or not sex selection for social reasons should be permitted, until we know more about the processes of sex determination, or, as I argued, sex predetermination. But in his response to this idea, Dahl (in press) has leapt well into the future, to a place I had not yet imagined! And yes, I see the logic of his position. If, as I suggest, there is such a thing as sex predetermination in mammals, and if an adaptive, and possibly important, process underlies it, I should withdraw my objection to sex selection and instead argue in favour of it.
If my hypotheses were shown to be correct, it might indeed mean that fertility specialists would practise sex selection, simply to increase the chances of success. But the word ‘social’ would be the wrong one to describe this new preselection process; rather, this new process would need to be based on the physiological and psychological attributes of the mother-to-be. Consider, then, the case of a mother seeking to select the sex of her next child with a view to family balancing. If she had not changed along the relevant dimensions since her last pregnancy, she would be very unlikely to conceive a child at all. And if she did, it would probably mean that she would have conceived a child of the desired sex without any technical intervention.
Even though these hypothesized new processes for sex preselection could result in reducing the choices for parents of single-sex sibships, interventions that took into account the physiological and psychological attributes of the mother might increase conception rates in previously infertile women. At the present time, it could be that the low fertility rates following some common procedures (especially intracytoplasmic sperm injection) do not reflect a lack of technical expertise, but rather the possibility that the mother has some role in the predetermination and/or the ratification of the sex of her infant.
But all this is speculative and even if supported by research, it is some way into the future, especially for human sex selection.
In the meantime, I have found no research evidence that adoptions carried out for the purpose of family balancing are seriously harmful. Dahl (in press) assumes, wrongly, that I was suggesting that children adopted under such conditions might be ‘at risk of being abused, neglected or abandoned’. But this is too extreme to describe what is more likely to be a mismatch between parental style and child characteristics. Such a mismatch simply means that the parents and the child, particularly the mother and the child, never really get on together or that the family style never really suits the adopted child (or the child whose sex has been preselected) in the way it has suited the natural children of the opposite sex. This lesser disadvantage means that one could not argue that there would be sufficient harm to warrant a legal restriction on procreative liberty. It could, however, mean that the case for the parental virtue of acceptance is enhanced (McDougall, 2005).
References
Dahl E. (in press) Evolution, morality and the law: on Valerie J. Grant’s case against sex selection. Hum Reprod.
Grant VJ. (2006) Sex predetermination and the ethics of sex selection. Hum Reprod 21:1659–1661.
McDougall R. (2005) Acting parentally: an argument against sex selection. J Med Ethics 31:601–605.
CiteULike 
Connotea 
Del.icio.us What's this?
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||