Money Can Buy You a Baby Girl. But What About Happiness?
Is this another sign that the “The End of Men” is near? Selecting the sex of your baby has become a multimillion dollar industry in this country, according to a fascinating article in Slate. It generates about $100 million in revenue each year. The kicker is that many parents in this country are, contra trends in India and China, selecting for girls:
Desperate for a baby girl, Simpson and her husband drove four hours to a fertility clinic in Michigan. Gender selection is illegal in Canada, which is why the couple turned to the United States. They paid $800 for a procedure that sorts sperm based on the assumption that sperm carrying a Y chromosome swim faster in a protein solution than sperm with an X chromosome do.
Simpson was inseminated with the slower sperm that same day. Fifteen weeks later, she asked a colleague at the hospital to sneak in an after-hours ultrasound. The results felt like a brick landing on her stomach: another boy.
“I lay in bed and cried for weeks,” said Simpson, now 36, whose name has been changed to protect her privacy. She took a job in the operating room so she would no longer have to work with women who were giving birth to girls.
Simpson and her husband talked about getting an abortion, but she decided to continue with the pregnancy. In the meantime, she looked for a way to absolutely guarantee that her next child would be the daughter she had always dreamed about. She discovered an online community of women just like her, confiding deep-seated feelings of depression over giving birth to boys. The Web forums mentioned a technique offered in the United States that would guarantee her next baby would be a girl. It would cost tens of thousands of dollars, money Simpson and her husband did not have. Simpson waited until her third son was born. Then she began to make some phone calls.
This article is full of interesting moral questions. Here’s one critic, for instance:
“It’s high-tech eugenics,” said Marcy Darnovsky, director of the Center for Genetics and Society, a Berkeley, Calif. nonprofit focused on reproductive technologies. “If you’re going through the trouble and expense to select a child of a certain sex, you’re encouraging gender stereotypes that are damaging to women and girls. …What if you get a girl who wants to play basketball? You can’t send her back.”
I can’t quite wrap my head around the consuming passion of wanting to have a baby girl as opposed to a baby boy, but given that our medical technologies give us the choice, is it a choice that we should make?
We know about the consequences of China’s “unnatural selection.” What will be the consequences of our own? Is this Western version of sex selection at all similar to the sex selection that goes on in places like China? In China and India, parents screen their fetuses so that they can abort them if they are girls. Simpson, upon finding out that she was pregnant with a son, contemplated getting an abortion.
I’m not interested in debating pro-life versus pro-choice issues here, but I do think that this article reveals an interesting fact about a culture like ours that is saturated with choices: That when we have the ability to choose nearly anything we want, we will never be satisfied until we have exactly what we think we want. Along these lines, I recommend psychologist Barry Schwartz’sThe Paradox of Choice, Why More Is Less: How the Culture of Abundance Robs us of Satisfaction. The theme of the book is that sometimes, it’s better to not have the choices than to have them.
I wonder if that wisdom would apply to Simpson’s situation.
There’s another problem with being so choosey. It can degrade the things we value. For instance, the title of the Slate article is “How to Buy a Girl.” To that end, the part of the article that disturbed me the most was a quote from Simpson, who eventually did end up having a girl with the help of her fertility doctors. Here is what she said about her daughter: “My husband and I stared at our daughter for that first year. She was worth every cent. Better than a new car, or a kitchen reno.”
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Comments:
Apr '11
Re: Money Can Buy You a Baby Girl. But What About Happiness?
Man. Think what it must be like to be this crazy person's sons. I have said it many times on these discussion boards. Eugenics will make a come back in a big way. And it will be harder than ever to fight it.
Oct '11
Re: Money Can Buy You a Baby Girl. But What About Happiness?
"...talked about getting an abortion..."
That they would even consider that upsets me. But they're already trying to play God when it comes to the baby's gender, so I guess it's not surprising.
Oct '11
Re: Money Can Buy You a Baby Girl. But What About Happiness?
Emily Esfahani Smith
There’s another problem with being so choosey. It can degrade the things we value. For instance, the title of the Slate article is “How to Buy a Girl.” To that end, the part of the article that disturbed me the most was a quote from Simpson, who eventually did end up having a girl with the help of her fertility doctors. Here is what she said about her daughter: “My husband and I stared at our daughter for that first year. She was worth every cent. Better than a new car, or a kitchen reno.”· 15 minutes ago
A baby or a kitchen renovation. You're right, Emily, being able to "choose" a baby's gender devalues that baby. How else could a mother compare (albeit favorably) her child to a new dishwasher?
Oct '10
Re: Money Can Buy You a Baby Girl. But What About Happiness?
The end of men? Women will be reduced to complaining about the woman who just went to the restroom rather than the men still at the table...
Nov '10
Re: Money Can Buy You a Baby Girl. But What About Happiness?
Sorting the sperm doesn't seem like such a big problem to me. Before I read it, I thought they were selecting fertilized eggs or embryos. It sounds a bit selfish to invest that many resources in pursuit of the exact family one wants, but sperm and eggs aren't humans.
What did bother me in a big way was that a.) this woman would consider aborting the baby because it was a boy; and b.) she pouted for weeks because it wasn't a girl. Poor kid.
We have been well taught that individual autonomy--fulfilling our dreams, getting what we want, being "happy"--is what is most important in life. Any obstacle to our happiness should be removed. This has become a religion that produces spoilt, selfish adherents. Marriages, families, and babies are sacrifices to this cult.
We will self-destruct on this path. But anyone who raises the alarm is accused of being stuck in the past, of standing in the way of science. Well, there were some good things in the past, too--ideas that kept us from coming unglued during national trials.
Apr '12
Re: Money Can Buy You a Baby Girl. But What About Happiness?
It's the same thing-- treating the kids as objects. Very popular, although the voices of those "purchases" might sway some.
Natural evolution, though; all focused on what the parents want, and not on the kid.
This won't be much of a blip on the "selecting for boys" thing, even in the US:
Several more at the link.
This made news because it's different, not because it's a big trend. Think I'll stick to not trying to find out my kids' sex until they're born, and trying not to growl at the idiots that talk about us "chasing a boy."
Dec '10
Re: Money Can Buy You a Baby Girl. But What About Happiness?
" Y chromosome swim faster in a protein solution than sperm with an X chromosome do."
Is it because of the hips?
Apr '11
Re: Money Can Buy You a Baby Girl. But What About Happiness?
sawatdeeka:
We have been well taught that individual autonomy--fulfilling our dreams, getting what we want, being "happy"--is what is most important in life.
· 35 minutes ago
What was it I once heard?
"The most disappointing thing in life is not getting what you want and the second most disappointing thing is getting it."
I don't remember who said this to me but it stuck.
I agree that the methods employed in this case don't seem unethical to me, though I frankly don't understand the theory behind the great sperm race. Really the desire driving this whole thing though I find really disturbing.
I assume that these people do actually love their boy children. So why so disappointed about having them? It is what always struck me when people say unwanted children.
May '10
Re: Money Can Buy You a Baby Girl. But What About Happiness?
What a struggle these days... not to fall into cynicism and despair. One can only say a prayer for these children and hope that they can overcome their parent's self-absorption. And hope that this fashion passes on.
Now, would anyone be surprised if there are soon angry demands for the government to pay for these expensive procedures?
May '10
Re: Money Can Buy You a Baby Girl. But What About Happiness?
When I saw the title I thought this would be about some sicko sex market in Thailand. After reading it I realized that the root motivation is identical. At root is the mindset that people are things that I can manipulate for my own personal happiness.
That is evil.
Jul '11
Re: Money Can Buy You a Baby Girl. But What About Happiness?
"When I saw that it was a boy I cried, we considered aborting but decided against it"
Right choice but that whole statement is vulgar otherwise. The woman is mentally ill in some fashion.
Apr '12
Re: Money Can Buy You a Baby Girl. But What About Happiness?
G.A. Dean: What a struggle these days... not to fall into cynicism and despair. One can only say a prayer for these children and hope that they can overcome their parent's self-absorption. And hope that this fashion passes on.
Now, would anyone be surprised if there are soon angry demands for the government to pay for these expensive procedures? · 17 minutes ago
They are paid for by the Canadian Health System.
Apr '12
Re: Money Can Buy You a Baby Girl. But What About Happiness?
I find it hard to believe that anyone would cry because they had been given the miraculous gift of a beautiful, baby boy.
To put a daughter on the same level as a new car is also beyond my comprehension.
We interfere too much with Nature at our peril.
Jul '11
Re: Money Can Buy You a Baby Girl. But What About Happiness?
I am not sure what she is upset about. Maybe she can convince her new child to embrace the gay lifestyle or possibly she can convince him to get a sex change. She still has some play left so why give the game up so soon?
Dec '11
Re: Money Can Buy You a Baby Girl. But What About Happiness?
I agree with comment #1 (Valiuth) and comment #11 (DocJay). What a grotesque story indeed; that couple could use a severe rebuke by Ann Romney!
Mar '12
Re: Money Can Buy You a Baby Girl. But What About Happiness?
For that first year, our little boys sat in the corner, ignored and unloved, because we never wanted them anyway.
Apr '12
Re: Money Can Buy You a Baby Girl. But What About Happiness?
The most important thing I learned (after a bit) as a parent, was that they weren't "mine"--they were human individuals who came to live in our family through our decision to give birth to them. My children don't live for me. I didn't live for them. We cared for them; we taught them values and skills and moral; but we don't own them. We LOVE them. They are people. They aren't accessories.
That is a chilling story.