“A discussion that starts with an impossible premise reveals a lot about the people discussing it, but doesn’t generate much light in terms of usable ethics.”
If you actually believe the question about choosing sex of one’s child to be “an impossible premise” may I suggest you have arrived at that point in ones intellectual life known as ‘premise revision’ time.
Control of our heredity is going to happen, sooner than you think.
Sooner than a friend of mine thought, and he had a Nobel in physics and had successfully switched to genetic engineering and founded one of the two leading labs in that field. We were talking progress in inter-species gene splicing while sitting on an airboat out in the interior of the Everglades.
He guessed the human DNA chain would be sequenced in his daughter’s lifetime (She was 15 at the time). As this was in 1980/81, clearly neither of us gave sufficient weight to the asymtotic curve of knowledge, as it has been sequenced for some years.
Count on Dr. StrangeLove’s Handy_Dandy_Gene_Lab opening up sooner than we will be prepared to make wise choices.
And choose we shall be forced to do - or our offspring will be left in the dust by those with “designer genes” and I am not referring to clothing.
The impossible premise to which I referred is choosing the “sexual orientation” of one’s children.