In the good old days, it was easy for a woman to choose the sex of her baby. If she wanted a girl, she would place a pink ribbon under her pillow and a wooden spoon under the bed. If she wanted a boy, she would eat lots of rare meat and make love with the man on top. These methods were safe, cheap and, best of all, would work perfectly on about 50% of occasions.
Technology has since progressed and several newspapers are today reporting claims that hundreds of would-be parents are travelling from the UK to the US each year to receive IVF treatments, with the sole aim of choosing the sex of their child. According to embryologist Daniel Potter, 80% of those doing so are demanding to have girls.
Explanations for this trend are coming in thick and fast. Ellie Lee of the University of Kent is quoted in the Times (paywalled link) as saying: “It could be a wider pattern of girls being on the up and boys going the other way ... There is a lot of negativity around boys – a fear that they get into trouble, that childhood conditions are more likely to affect them, that they have more problems than girls.”
Potter claims that the women he sees are desperate for a girl, having grown up playing with dolls and always imagining themselves with a daughter. He told the Telegraph: “Some have only one child but most have two or three of the same gender. The process is driven by the mother who has identified with little girls since her own childhood and has always had a place for a daughter. When they do not have one, it is like a death and they grieve for their little girl.”
Perhaps some insight into the mindset involved can be gleaned from a certain flavour of newspaper columnist. You may recall a couple of years ago the Daily Mail ran one of its pages of button-jabbing provocation, in which Esther Walker described her fears that the embryo in her womb might be male. “Boys are gross,” she wrote. “They attack their siblings with sticks, are obsessed with toilets, casually murder local wildlife and turn into disgusting teenage boys and then boring, selfish men.”
In the Telegraph today, Beverley Turner is slightly more subtle but conveys the same concerns: “Most mothers who have tried to get their four-year-old son to sit still long enough to watch you peel a pile of carrots will know what I’m talking about. These women go for coffee with other new mums and watch enviously as the little girls crowd around a colouring book for a quiet half-an-hour, while their son climbs up the back of the sofa, knocks over their latte and up-ends a shelf of neatly stacked bottled water.”
It is at precisely this point that I want to assemble all these doctors, parents and newspaper columnists in one place and, in a strictly metaphorical, non-violent way, bang their bloody heads together.
Children are not defined by their biological sex or even their socially constructed gender performance. You may have a child who loves to run, jump, climb, kick footballs and come home caked in mud, and that child may grow to be the next David Beckham or Jessica Ennis. You may raise a child who loves to sit and draw or write stories, who may become the next Alison Bechdel or Alan Moore. If you want your child to learn to sit politely when you’re having coffee, teach your child some manners. If you fantasise about raising a perfect princess who can be dressed exactly as you like, with her hair and make-up done to perfection then buy a Barbie doll because you’re clearly not ready to handle a real human being with a mind of her own.
There is overwhelming evidence that a very large proportion of the variations in gender performance between young boys and young girls can be accounted for by children’s astonishing ability to grow to match our expectations of them. People who believe that boys are uncontrollable monsters will too often find themselves parenting uncontrollable monsters. Meanwhile any parent who is welded to a strict image of how their child will grow and behave is asking for trouble and disappointment. Most children have their own quirks. Some are gender non-conforming. All are a complex mix of learned behaviours, emotions, habits and genes.
Rumbling beneath the unsubtle PR campaign which has driven this week’s news is I suspect, a covert agenda. The private IVF industry would like nothing more than to overturn the law that bans sex selection practices for non-clinical reasons. Such a liberalisation would open up a potentially huge and lucrative market.
It is pressure which should be, I believe, resisted. This is not so much because it could lead to calamitous sex-ratio problems – I firmly believe the overwhelming majority of parents would continue to think “so long as she or he is healthy I don’t care”. However making sex selection mainstream would validate the false and damaging belief that our social, psychological and emotional destiny is determined by our genitalia. We have spent the past 50 years taking significant steps away from those assumptions, to everyone’s benefit.
This is one of those instances where technological progress can be socially regressive. If you really want a girl, stick to the wooden spoon under the mattress method.