Banned wagon
A weekly stovey of the things our rulers want to prohibit
IF there were any doubt that our society now works on a presumption against liberty, it has been made obvious by the reaction to the recent news that an American clinic has helped 200 couples choose the sex of their baby using a `gender-screening' technique costing 0,600 a time. The Department of Health immediately announced that it was going to think about new regulations, while Dr Richard Nicholson, who edits a learned journal on medical ethics, likened the business to something out of Nazi Germany.
But why the rush to condemn? Contrary to Dr Nicholson's cheap jibe, the concept of individuals freely choosing to use a technique to determine the sex of their child is as far from the authoritarian social engineering of Nazism as it is possible to imagine.
There may be good reasons why particular fertility treatments should be banned — if, for example, they are shown to damage sperm and so increase the risk of babies being born deformed. But those who have rushed in to call for an outright ban on the grounds that they find the whole business distasteful show an inbuilt mistrust of citizens making their own ethical decisions.
It is asserted that, if parents are allowed the means to choose the sex of their baby, they will all, like Chinese parents who neglect their daughters, want boys. Yet the tragedy of China's unwanted daughters has occurred precisely because Chinese parents don't have enough free choice in their family-planning, not because they have too much.
For most of human history, parents have been trusted to breed by themselves; the advent of fertility and genetic techniques should make no difference. Even in the unlikely event of everyone choosing to conceive a 'designer' baby, it will do nothing — to judge by the myriad of clothing styles worn in public — to reduce the variety of human beings.
Ross Clark
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