Ethical Issues on Gender Selection


There are three core motivations for engaging in sex determination and sex or gender selection:

  • Medical reasons – such as preventing the birth of children affected or at risk of X-linked disorders.
  • Family balancing reasons – here couples choose to have a child of one sex because they already have one or more children of the other sex.
  • Gender preference reasons – often in favour of male offspring stemming from cultural, social, and economic bias in favour of male children and as a result of policies requiring couples to limit reproduction to one child, as in China.




Some people believe that gender selection for non-medical reasons raises serious moral, legal, and social issues. The principal concerns are that the practice of gender selection will

  • distort the natural male to female ratio leading to a gender imbalance and
  • reinforce discriminatory and sexist stereotypes towards women by devaluing females.

Other people think that it could be unethical only to offer a method of sperm sorting to select the sex of the baby.

On the other hand, some people are really concerned about what they consider the illegal art of discarding “potential babies” or the unnecessary creation of more embryos for fertility treatments than is needed. In fact, the statements of such ethicist dueling make an individual an “ethicist” agreeing and disagreeing with any of them.

Since there is no career or training to become a “professional” in ethics, this is more likely a moral matter based on each individual’s information about the facts involved with gender selection. Perhaps a decision may defer to that coming from an ethicist, but how can someone know whether a person can qualify as expert or authority in ethics?





Accepting gender selection could just like accepting freedom of speech. If a couple chooses to select the gender of their offspring then they should not be concerned about society and society should not discriminate any child, or label them as so-called designer babies. The fact is that other than creating some ethical guidelines in gender selection, no one has enough authority to say what is right or wrong in bay gender selection.

Countries prohitbit gender selection

WordPress Data Table

Data from BioPolicy Wiki





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