An article in this morning paper about sex selection brought up the specter of “playing God” when it comes to reproductive choices:
We’e not messing around with God the creator.
Well, actually we do mess around with God and The Plan every single day of our lives. We wear seatbelts, helmets, gloves, eyewear and a mess of other things to avoid injury or death.
We get shots for the flu, inject ourselves with insulin and take pills for heart problems. We wear prosthetic limbs, glasses and hearing devices to overcome difficulties. In fact, the entire medical industry routinely supplants this thing called God and its Great Plan with barely a peep out of us commoners.
So, why should we abstain from messing with The Plan when it comes to reproductive choices? It seems to me that unless you subscribe to the idea that every embryo is a human being, there really is no reason to abstain. It also appears to be an attempt to control the lives of others. Who, besides the local atheist, can argue with a God’s Plan(tm) argument?
Is sex selection unnatural in that it does not occur in the wild? Yes, it is. However, humans do various things that do not occur in the wild. For example, the use of fire – to my knowledge we are the only species that uses fire as a tool. When the food runs out in the wild, the animals move or die. When the food runs out here in civilization, we import it from or export it to other areas.
Does sex selection validate violence against daughters? No more than medical selection validates violence against the blind. The violence comes not from technological advances, but societal standards. A group that deems a certain part of that group superior is prone to be violent towards the polar opposite.
The superiority complex is the problem and no amount of banning this and that will make it go away. If a society values men more it will continue to devalue women, even if women are the majority and it is technically illegal to kill female embryos.
So, in short, I do not see any reason to forbid sex selection. If someone wants a dog, why should I make them get a cat, especially if they do not want (or even like) a cat? It seems to me that doing such a thing while mumbling something about the gods and their plans would jeopardize the health and welfare of the hypothetical cat.
Forcing people to care for a male child they do not want shows that the problem wasn’t with supposed bigotry towards male children, but a de facto refusal to let others make the decisions that are best for them provided they are not causing harm to another actual person.
If you do not believe me, send me a dog with a note that it is part of the Great God Plan that every person has one. In a few months, you can stop by and see that while its fed and taken care of in terms of physical health it is banned to nether region of the backyard if I had not managed to get rid of it first.
I do not want a dog. No amount of God Designs(tm) and anti-dog discrimination laws are going to change that. Putting a dog with me is stupid and shows a severe lack of care for said dog.
Furthermore, the lack of a dog in my house does not validate my neighbor trying to starve his dog to death.
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