Much has been written about the ethics of sex selection. This article thoroughly explores the ethical arguments put forth in the literature both for and against non-medical sex selection using sperm sorting. While most of these arguments come from philosophers, feminist scholars, social scientists and members of the healthcare community, they are often echoed in empirical studies that have explored community values. This review is timely because the first efficacious method for sex selection via sperm sorting, MicroSort, is currently in (...) clinical trials and moving closer to FDA approval for marketing in the USA. While the clinical trials are currently focused on the use of MicroSort to avoid X-linked genetic diseases, MicroSort can also be used to satisfy parental preferences. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

Bioethics and feminist scholarship has explored various justice implications of nonmedical sex selection and family balancing. However, prospective users’ viewpoints have been absent from the debate over the socially acceptable bounds of nonmedical sex selection. This qualitative study provides a set of empirically grounded perspectives on the moral values that underpin prospective users’ conceptualizations of justice in the context of a family balancing program in the United States. The results indicate that couples pursuing family balancing understand justice primarily in individualist (...) and familial terms rather than in terms of social justice for women and girls or for children resulting from sex selection. Study participants indicated that an individual’s desire for gender balance in their family is ethically complex and may not be inherently sexist, immoral, or socially consequential, particularly given the social context in which they live. Our findings suggest that the social conditions that contribute to prospective users’ desires for gender balance in their families may direct them away from recognizing or engaging broader social justice concerns relating to sexism and stratified reproduction. (shrink)

The most benign rationale for sex selection is deemed to be “family balancing.” On this view, provided the sex distribution of an existing offspring group is “unbalanced,” one may legitimately use reproductive technologies to select the sex of the next child. I present four novel concerns with granting “family balancing” as a justification for sex selection: families or family subsets should not be subject to medicalization; sex selection for “family balancing” entrenches heteronormativity, inflicting harm in at least three specific ways; (...) the logic of affirmative action is appropriated; the moral mandate of reproductive autonomy is misused. I conclude that the harms caused by family balancing are sufficiently substantive to override any claim arising from a supposed right to sex selection as an instantiation of procreative autonomy. (shrink)

The concept of sex selection for “family balancing” is based on the notion that a family is “balanced” when it includes children of “both genders.” Clinics that offer IVF for family balancing present it as an option for couples who “want to experience the joy of raising both a male and female child”. Families with at least one child of each gender are claimed to have gender diversity and to provide more enriching experiences to all family members. Some theorists call (...) these families “balanced”, while others acknowledge that such a term could be pejorative, implying that families with children of one gender are unbalanced and, thereby, lesser. These theorists... (shrink)