Whitehorn's world Should we select our baby’s sex?

Press, 21 May 1987, Page 16

Whitehorn's world Should we select our baby’s sex?

By

KATHARINE WHITEHORN

“If you had known what sex your baby was going to be, would you have had it?” is a question which mothers rather avoid asking themselves, like “If you had known about bubble gum ...” or “If you had known about acne ...”

Those who do end up with one-sex families, where a mix had been hoped for, often find there are advantages after all: all girls, and you never have to talk about cars or cricket and they wash their own blouses; all boys, and at least you don’t stay awake wondering if they’re being raped. ,The perfectly balanced family seems ideal on paper, but in practice the jealousies, rivalries, contrasts and feuds can range

equally well across any assortment of siblings. In the West, it is likely that even if parents did get into the way of selecting the sex of the baby (by having the amniotic fluid tested, and then maybe opting for abortion) no major population shift would result.

Some people actually want girls (my mother once told me the lengths they went to, according to the folklore of the time, to make sure that I was a female). And in the days when couples who wanted to adopt got a choice, girls were if anything preferred — though you could, of course, say that in those cases Dad’s dynastic feelings — his “selfish genes” — were not involved. But look wider, towards the rest of the world, and you see a very different picture: whole continents

where the desire for a boy is overwhelming.

A friend who lives among Arabs is teased with a special word that means “father of daughters.” In India, you couldn’t say they actually do away with girl babies; but boys, by nature more frail, none the less outnumber the girls by the time they are five. In China, they are having second thoughts about the one-child family largely because, where so many are desperate for boys, the girl babies too often end up outside the house on a very cold night. Amniocentesis is not exactly a technique to practise in the outback; thought that wouldn’t stop the quacks having a stab at it, and no culture is without its methods of abortion. But in any case,

ways of determining, rather than discovering, the sex of the newcomer are improving all the time.

It has even been suggested, by the population people, that getting boys first go might be the only thing that would persuade some cultures to cut down on the number of births over-all; for if a peasant culture needs boys to run the farm or perform the last sacred rites, you can wave condoms and caps at them like a Punch and Judy show and it won’t make a blind bit of difference.

If people want more boys, and the means may be at hand to ensure they get them, then what? It would be nice to think that, as girls become more rare, they would become more precious: that they would have the power to pick and choose among the available males and turn down the bullies and boorish. But I doubt it.

Look what has happened with other innovations which you might have thought would improve woman’s lot: half the time they’ve done nothing of the sort, if the family still calls the shots.

Western feminists see cash wage-packets as the only hope for women — but there are plenty of places where the wife’s wages go straight to her husband or her mother-in-law, she just has two work-loads instead of one.

Or birth control, the great liberator: it doesn’t act as such in a country like Kenya, where a man’s children act as proof of his virility; there,

they think family planning means maybe stopping at your seventh. Males have a great knack of keeping up the dominance, even where you’d expect it least. Polyandrous societies, for example, are not like polygamy in reverse, with a woman queening it over a bevy of pretty males; on the contrary, she’s simply expected to serve three men instead of one — in every sense of the word. It is not scarcity but a surplus of women that usually leads to more of them having some choice about their lives. It was the two million extra females between the wars who battled their way into

better jobs for the girls; all those articles about combining motherhood with a career would never had been written, think of that, if there hadn’t first been pioneer women competing on the job alone.

When men outnumber the women, the spare men don’t just stay home and mope; they go further down the age-scale to find a bride, gathering up the teenagers before they’ve had time for ambitions of their own (in Sir Alan Parkes’ book "Science, Sex and Society” there t was even a cartoon of this ’scene: men with long white beards queuing up to court a sub-teenager). And since any society

still needs some women to breed the race, then, if there are fewer of them, they’re even less likely to be allowed to do anything else.

. A pregnant woman working in a fish bar in Osaka told us she didn’t want to know the sex of her coming baby: “that leads to abortions.” I don’t suppose she was taking any very long view for women generally. It is possible, though, that by the next century the cry of feminists will be reversed: not "abortion on demand” but “no demand for abortion.” Or even, I suppose, “no abortion without representation.”