Bioethics & medical ethics
Should People Be Able to Choose the Sex of Their Children?
LNAT Section B · Model essay
The essay prompt
As reproductive technology advances, should parents be permitted to select whether their child is born male or female? If choice is allowed at all, where should the line fall?
The stance
No. Outside the narrow case of avoiding a serious sex-linked disease, people should not be permitted to choose their child's sex. Reproductive liberty is real but bounded, and non-medical sex selection trades a private preference against equality, the dignity of the child and the integrity of medicine. The settled UK, Canadian and Council-of-Europe positions get this right.
The case for
Reproductive autonomy: intimate family decisions belong to parents, not the state.
Liberal societies leave childbearing decisions to individuals because they are deeply personal and self-regarding. On a Millian view, where a choice harms no identifiable third party the state should not interfere. Family balancing, for a couple who already have three sons and want a daughter, looks like exactly the kind of private decision the law should leave alone.
The case against
Demographic harm: private preferences aggregate into population-level injustice.
Where son preference exists, free sex selection produces skewed sex ratios. The natural ratio is about 105 boys per 100 girls; China and parts of India have run well above 110, and the UNFPA estimates roughly 142 million "missing" women and girls worldwide. On Mill's own harm principle, autonomy stops where it inflicts this scale of collective harm, and regulators cannot reliably police millions of private motives.
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