Susie O’Brien: There is no good reason to lift ban on non-medical sex selection

Aussie parents travelling overseas to choose the sex of their babies for “family balancing” reasons are simply trying to perfectly reproduce themselves in their children — and dancing on a very slippery ethical slope.

Australia bans non-medical sex selection of babies. Picture: Supplied

It’s sad some parents are so desperate for a child of one particular sex that they are willing to go overseas for expensive and invasive IVF.

They call it family balancing.

I call it vanity parenting – the wish to perfectly reproduce yourselves in your children.

Psychologists even have a name for it: “Gender disappointment”.

It’s now a recognised disorder reflecting the anguish some people feel when they find out they are having a baby of the “wrong” sex.

What ever happened to people just being grateful for having a healthy child and leaving it at that?

I have friends with desperately ill children who would give anything for a healthy child of either sex.

Illness is something that has a way of teaching us what’s really important in life.

Being able to order a girl or a boy baby like a pepperoni pizza shouldn’t be important to anyone.

The sex of babies shouldn’t be ordered like a pizza. Picture: Supplied

I have other friends who are in their early 40s and who are realising they may never bear children of their own.

They’d also be happy for a healthy child of either sex.

So I am not very sympathetic to those who make baby-making more complicated than it needs to be for their own selfish ends.

I am talking about sex selection for family reasons, not for medical reasons.

There are some very good medical reasons why some couples want to choose the sex of their baby, such as a genetic predisposition to haemophilia or cystic fibrosis, which are more prevalent in one sex.

Others have more pressing personal reasons for wanting gender selection, such as the loss of a baby girl born in a family of boys.

But wanting to choose the sex of your baby just to balance out the family feels wrong.

There is a big gap between vaguely wanting a boy or a girl, and making it an expensive biological imperative.

Surely there is a slippery slope here — once we let people choose babies on the basis of sex, what’s to stop selection on the basis of hair colour or height or intelligence?

The decision to choose a boy or a girl are based on sexist notions. Picture: Tony Phillips

What worries me is that a lot of the decisions to choose a boy or a girl are based on quite sexist notions of what kids of each sex are like.

So a family has a number of boys, and goes to the US seeking a girl because they think she is going to be more nurturing and less rough?

What if she’s not? What then? They can’t hand her back. They may be setting themselves up for a lifetime of disappointment.

In any case, experts say that in this country 80 per cent of families turn to experts because they want a girl, which is pretty offensive to boys.

The existence of a human being should be based on whether the child is wanted and can be cared for, not whether it is a boy or a girl.

There’s no certainty when it comes to sex selection, and there should never be.

It’s one of the last great mysteries of parenthood and birth.

Non-medical sex selection is not possible here, and there’s no good reason to change this. The stork might make deliveries, but he shouldn’t take orders.