hmmm. Personally, I do think that you shouldn't even know what sex your baby is let alone be able to choose it. "Its a Boy!" "no sir thats the umbilical cord".

And of course you being able to choose hair style and eye colour is a no no.

But then on the flip side you got 2 girls and you want a boy. What right do I have to say you should not be allowed to guarantee you to have a boy. Of course I could go back and say "its your male semen fault for not being manly enough".

Yeah. We have the technology to do this but should we use it?

I see no harm in wanting a boy or girl in particular, but it does seem kind of...artificial. Hmm.

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And of course you being able to choose hair style and eye colour is a no no.

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Why?

I guess its all down to the luck of the gene pool. To create a little baby out of all of you families history.

If your able to choose the eye colour and hair colour, It just takes away from the whole guessing of what the kid will turn out to be. Even if they turn out to be ginger.

I really don't feel like it's any of my business at all. Every decision someone makes is their responsibility, including the reprecussions.

I did see a show about this in Science class. A woman had tried gender picking for a girl but recieved a boy in spite of it. It took her weeks to accept the child.

There wouldn't be a really huge issue if the desire to have a child correlated with the desire to be a good parent. How many parents do you see on, say, the Little League field who don't have their child's best interests at heart, but instead are trying to soothe their own insecurities, or chase their lost dreams vicariously, or otherwise use their kid as a showpiece? It's bad enough when a child has to put up with unrealistic expectations, demands, and interference from an emotionally unhealthy parent for 18 years until they can break out and live for themselves as an adult. You can't move away from your genes.

I don't have a problem with going after things like Huntington's Disease, or Autism, or Downs' Syndrome, where it's going to kill the child at a young age, or seriously affect their ability to live life to its fullest. When we start talking about selecting hair and eye color, though, we start opening ourselves up to some serious problems. Not to mention that once we start messing with our genes, we may stop evolving. Diversity isn't something I think it would be wise for our species to give up.

Essentially, I view non-health-related in-utero gene tweaking on about the same level as letting parents have completely unabrogated authority to put their child through unnecessary plastic surgeries.

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When we start talking about selecting hair and eye color, though, we start opening ourselves up to some serious problems.

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One of the few times where I agree with you Cycle.

This wouldn't be so frightening if it weren't for examples like China where femicide is prevalent. Chinese citizens are no longer legally allowed to use medical proceedures or abortions to pick the sex of their children because overwhelmingly boys were picked. I'd hate to see people use this new medical technology for this purpose.

Whether boys or girls are preferred in a society, the shift in sex ratios could potentially result in a negative outcome. Valerie Hudson and Andrea Den Boer wrote a really interesting article for several political science and foreign affairs journals about possible scenarios in China and India. They theorize that there could be up to 200 million excess (I believe, I wrote a paper on this a few years ago) men in China and India by the year 2020 that will be unable to marry and will therefore be more likely to participate in warfare.

Of course this assumes that all men are heterosexual, and that men are inherently more violent than women. Neither of which I believe in. It does seem logical though that if a nation had hundreds of millions of excess young men without families you could develop quite an army.

Anyways this is the article that is now a book:
mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/...&tid=10694

Just something to think about when considering the consequences of letting people pick the sex.

Eh, I support the natural way, personally. As soon as I'm done cycling through one nighters and short-termers (Dont hold your breath) and settle down, I figure the genes of myself and whatever girl is awesome enough to stand me will make the best rockstar *ever*.

And I support eugenics, seeing as though if it's anything like that movie Gattaca (Good movie, good movie. Cripple burns.) we could start making 12-fingered dudes that would totally shred out some guitar.

I agree with Veckums. If they have sexist attitudes they'd instill them on their kids whether they chose the gender or not. Anyone here ever heard the story "I'm not my brother, I'm me"? If I remember correctly it was about someone who was judged based on what his older brothers were like. I don't remember all the names, so I'll go by youngest, middle, oldest. The youngest brother was barely ever given any privacy because people always expected him to be violent like the middle brother, yet at the same time he was expected to perform well academically like his oldest brother. Later in the story it was revealed that the middle brother acted the way he did because he was so sick of being expected to be like the oldest brother. Why am I bringing this up? It sends the message that how they're treated would affect their personality more than genetics.

This brings up the question: Would males really act differently than females solely because their hormones would make them act differently, or could it also have a fair bit to do with them being treated differently because of their gender?

As for whether or not I support the idea, for me the only thing I really have against it is that it isn't much incentive for them to adopt instead. Granted, if a lot of people do this and most of them want the same gender, that could create quite a gender imbalance... but hey, that'd only make it harder for people to have more kids and then it might help bring the world's population down.

And that brings me to my response to Astrid; (whom the rest of this post is said to) Again, gender imbalance means not as much reproduction, at least if the gender imbalance is in favour of men. And since, well, at least my reason for that is because of the whole gender imbalance in favour of men making it hard to have more kids thing, to call that a sexist way to think is like saying that tuition fees at universities are discrimination against the poor... the similarity being that the reason is of practicality, not of discrimination...

After all, a decreased human population would probably save more lives than a lack of war.

You seem to be the first person I have met to question the idea of most men necessarily being more violent than women. Yet it seemed from some of your messages in the chat (I don't mean today I mean a few weeks ago) that you were a feminist. Well, where I live there's a feminist organization that gives out pamphlets that say "he becomes abusive, she tries to keep the peace, he pretends to be sorry, she forgives him, he becomes abusive again" in their descriptions of what domestic abuse would be like. Assuming there's an equivalent of that organization, in Texas, would you question that idea* to those groups?

*See beginning of paragraph.

Also, you associate not marrying off with wanting to join the army? I've never ever been asked out before. Yet I doubt I'd ever want to join the army. I wouldn't be willing to risk my life like that, let alone be willing to risk fighting in battles that I wouldn't agree with... there's many other reasons, it's not like family is the only, or necessarily even main thing keeping them away from joining the army.

I'm a feminist because I believe in the constructions of gender that socialize our children and shape our lives. I don't believe men are inherently more violent than women. I believe that most men are socialized from childhood to be more assertive, confident and prideful than women. Those are not negative character traits, but taken to their extremes they are more likely to result in violent behavior than traits typically encouraged in women (forgiveness, domesticity, etc.)

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Also, you associate not marrying off with wanting to join the army? I've never ever been asked out before. Yet I doubt I'd ever want to join the army. I wouldn't be willing to risk my life like that, let alone be willing to risk fighting in battles that I wouldn't agree with... there's many other reasons, it's not like family is the only, or necessarily even main thing keeping them away from joining the army.

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For hundreds of years Western armies have been theorizing what demographic is best served to military service. Read "Manuvers" by Cynthia Enloe. It's a really great anthology containing declassified British, Canadian and American military documents from the mid 19th century to today concerning whether or not to encourage men to marry, whether or not to encourage men to be sexually promiscuous, whether or not men should be encouraged to have children. Currently men in the services are being encouraged to marry because the government believes that women are more likely to "be patriotic and a stabilizing influence". Other governments, and our own government during different times in our history, typically conceed that unmarried men are better fighters because they do not have the added stress of worrying about a family. It's a contested subject, I don't really know which is better one way or another. But there ARE more unmarried men in the services than married men, especially in units that are high combat.

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I'm a feminist because I believe in the constructions of gender that socialize our children and shape our lives.

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I really don't know what you mean by this... are you saying they socialize children by acting similarly, or differently?

Well it seems you agree that how they are taught to act has more effect than the gender itself has on it. I guess when it comes to being passive, assertive, or agressive, if the average of a group is assertive, then it'll mean there's as much on the agressive side as on the passive side, whereas if the average is passive then there will be very few agressive... I guess that's the point you're making, is it?

I don't like how you compare forgiveness to domesticity, since I find forgiveness more logical than domesticity, but that's far off topic so I won't start on that, since I know I'd go on about it for a too long...

Well, you bring up the subject about who will join armies, etc... interesting arguments on both sides, but my comment was more so about how other things than family would easily prevent someone from joining an army... but I agree that worrying about a family would probably be quite a problem...

I don't like the idea of encouraging ANYONE to be sexually promiscuous (putting them at risk for STDs like AIDS) or even of them marrying and/or having kids, but yeah I know I'm not the one to say what they should or shouldn't do.

And what about female soldiers? Does whatever you're referring to mention them?

Anyway, bringing this back on topic, I think it's best to at least give them the option of choosing the gender, and not to assume that distinct results (Eg. gender imbalance) will necessarily be negative. And if, let's say, there are opposite gender imbalances in different countries, they could bring the excess gender to the other country and help balance it off for both... and that's IF a gender imbalance is mostly a bad thing...

eugenics is very old, today we use science, but before <the primitive method, as I call it> people would match-make according to history and appearance. it's not strange to expect a child from a blond mother to have blue eyes or a child from a dark skinned father to have dark skin.

we all still use eugenics, I don't believe it's fair to blame new age methods "science" on a matter we already have done using primitive methods many times in the past and still do today.
it's hard to raise a daughter, especially for a family with low income, the best choice would be to have a son who can help the family and himself. in 3rd world countries that is the case for many striving families. So to them this is not a sexist decision to make but one depending on survival and welfare.
I do not agree on the usage of scientific methods, however I will not lie to the verity I would use primitive eugenic evaluation on the father of my own children someday in the future.
skin color, health and at times the gender of a child are all important to the parents. we all would try to have some control over what we believe would be best for our children.
however in the case of someone choosing the gender of their child simply out of rejection to a certain gender, is unacceptably sexist.