Girls cost more - A pollFollow

I voted other because I think that it might be good in some circumstances. Given the history of countries where a boy is more valued, I think this could be a technology that could very easily disrupt society for generations.

So, yes and no.

This reminds me of the discussion in the OOT that we had about a book I read. My Sister's Keeper was the book, and it was about a family who had two kids, and the younger one was diagnosed with cancer. The other kid wasn't a genetic match, so they went to a fertility clinic and had the doc implant an embryo that was a perfect genetic match for their daughter so they could use the core blood from the baby's umbilical cord to help her.

That worked, but the cancer came back years later, so they took bone marrow from their youngest. Then they needed platelets. The book starts where they know that any day now, they will need to do a kidney transplant from the youngest daughter to the older daughter.

For firstborn children, no.

In the situation where they want to keep trying until they have a boy, if they have the option to pick, they can stop at #2.

Wasn't this what happened to the Weasleys in the Harry Potter books? They went through six or seven boys before they finally had Ginny.

I don't think it was ever stated that they were trying for a girl...

I guess Mrs. Weasley just liked knockin boots.

Maybe they were Catholic wizards?

My wife and I looked into this and from what we could find out most of the sperm sorting companies did not have significantly more success then you can get by...doing it at the right time.

Could the government get involved:
From the science I've seen on gender selection, it is possible that environmental factors could shift the human gender balance (although the science is pretty preliminary and any straightforward interpretation of the ideas presented would have far greater impacts then gender). But if that happened, having a way to restore the balance is a good thing. Even if that happened, it is likely people would try for the minority gender on their own without government enforcement.

I have two girls and they are wonderful. Were we going to have a third, it would be kind of nice to have a boy, but I like the idea of nature choosing. If we were only going to have one child, I'd probably choose to have a girl, but likely that is because we already have them.

Wait, why do girls cost more?

In certain cases you can...

It is completely glossed over in the gay marriage debates but the number of people born with...I don't know how to put this...non-stereotypical gender is actually pretty high (somewhere between one in a hundred and one in a thousand depending on exactly what you're talking about).

No.

If you don't want to read a tangent, stop at that.

What we need to be spending all this time and money on is getting over the idea that there is one sex that is better or more beneficial than the others or costs less or is more of a burden or is better for a family or can carry on a family name or is more favored by God or any of the other ridiculous and painful viewpoints we have out there.

After reading about more than 22 million "missing" women in India, as just one example of gender preference and its impact, I think we have bigger problems than worrying about which set of genes is more likely to desire a more expensive pair of jeans. We live in a world where baby girls are drowned, choked, poisoned, or burned to death because they can't carry on the family name or light a funeral pyre for their parent's passage to heaven. I carry a world of heartache around with me for little girls who are murdered or abandoned because of out-dated assumptions of what they're capable of or what they "cost".

The reality is that we live in a world NOW where governments and cultures are involved with the genders of citizen babies being born, or at least living past a few days old.

Nexa

Edited to change "other" sex to "others". Deal with it, ********.

Edited, Feb 11th 2009 1:16pm by Nexa

Nexa summed things up quite perfectly, in my opinion. The idea that such "preferences" still exist is disgusting on its face.

I can't imagine that quantity of rejection would really be very good for your psyche, but who am I to judge?

Nexa

Lion prides come to mind.

Nexa

Hawt.

Nexa