Shaping Future Children, Sex Selection, and “Normal” Human Capacities

ABSTRACT

If we think that parents have an obligation to have a healthy child then we need to know what counts as healthy, when male and female children are born with very different capacities. If we give up on the idea that our obligations to use technologies of genetic selection are discharged once we try to secure the birth of a healthy child, as advocates of human enhancement insist that we should, it seems that parents will be either be obligated to choose male children or obligated to choose female children, depending on whether it is better to be born male or female. The only way to avoid the conclusion that parents have reason to prefer children of one sex is to concede that a reference to normal human health plays a central, and proper, role in our deliberations about the ethics of genetic selection. Importantly, this concept of normal human health is bifurcated, such that both male infants and female infants can count as healthy babies. Placing sex selection alongside selection against genetic disease and selection for the best child therefore reveals the importance of intuitions about the normative significance of sex that are increasingly contested in wider debates about the salience of sex for medicine and social policy.