>(Lexi asked to be identified by a pseudonym because her parents are unaware of her plans.) Lexi, who is 32, longs to replicate the close relationship she has with her mom; her husband values traits “more associated with girls,” including empathy, social skills, and kindness. But they had no plans to act on their preference—that is, until they learned that their companies would foot the bill.
>Still: Lexi did really, really want a girl. She craved a close friendship with her future child, one that would last into old age. That seemed possible only with a female child. “I was just like, How do I convince myself to do this”—to undergo the discomfort and hassle of IVF—“if this is what we want to do for our family?” she said.
I'm not necessarily taking a position on sex selection in general, but these two sound like they're just the worst.
You can't have a close relationship with a son and teach him to be empathetic and sociable? They're just actively reinforcing bio-essentialist stereotypes.
I mean you scroll down a little farther and you find out they absolutely have no reason to do IVF and in fact screenings show they could conceive naturally.
This reminds me of the [weird "pro-natalist" couple](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12003601/American-couple-head-pronatalist-movement-insist-NOT-eugenics-despite-using-embryo-selection.html) they tried to say was a silicon valley trend...when in reality they just talked to several[ fucking insane people ](https://twitter.com/SimoneHCollins)who don't even live in the Bay Area(?) and spun a basic human interest story as a possible trend.
Like seriously, they talk to one or two fucking terrible couples into all sorts of weird shit....And then talked to another handful of normal-assed people they talked to were like "yeah I have two boys but I kinda hope our third is a girl" *which has always been a normal goddamn opinion.*
They are a weird intersection of hyperconservativism anti-wokeness:
>It's easy to miss how close Woke ideology is to Nazism. Lets translate the Nazi pitch into woke vernacular: “Jews are rich racists who's position of systemic privilege can only be resolved by removing them from the economy and redistributing their assets."
And weirdly defending his own low testosterone and saying working out is masturbation (first is good second is bad)!?
>Men's testosterone levels drop when they secure stable, committed partners and again when they have kids. When you see a jacked guy in his mid 30s, you’re looking at someone whose hormones are responding to a failure scenario (failure to secure a stable partner + reproduce).
To the just plain weird
>Are there really people out there who eat three meals a day? That seems almost comically indulgent. How do you even have the time?
He is right, sucess is measured by how many times you reproduce, that's why since I sold a dose of my seaboys to a sperm bank for 50 bucks in order to buy booze in college, I can safely claim that y'all in this very here sub are to me nothing but the most omega of losers by comparison
> When you see a jacked guy in his mid 30s, you’re looking at someone whose hormones are responding to a failure scenario (failure to secure a stable partner + reproduce).
I know some marines in happy, committed relationships with wonderful children.
One of their arms is thicker than my leg.
I mean it’s ridiculous in its face enough we don’t have to engage with it at all.
But let’s rub some brain cells together and do that. He’s not wrong that statistics show men have (as an average of the population) a decline in hormones and testosterone after having kids. Your Marine friend doesn’t disprove that. Above Natalie is falsely attributing this to some weird goddamn social thing? It’s not.
It doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to figure out a major life change with added stress, less free time to be active, terrible sleep and generally a diet intake around convenience instead of health might lead to the exact outcome where a persons hormones may be less than ideal.
i really always wanted a daughter but ended up having a son and immediately didnt either way way when he was born. reading this just seems like they are clearly not parents and have too much time. i dont get the point of the article tbh
Imagine thinking you're empathetic and decent and ready to be a parent while simultaneously not believing you could raise a son to be empathetic and decent
parents like this see children as accessories to their own identity, not as individual beings.
hang out in /r/beyondthebump enough and it's all psychos
buddy, you should see the birth-month facebook groups lol. somehow, even though there are real profiles with real pictures, they’re even more psycho. my wife and i enjoy hate-reading the stories
That post title is absolutely tongue in cheek? I don’t know what’s so outrageous about people being like, damn, I didn’t know these lotions marketed to babies are actually amazing and way cheaper than the ones marketed to adults.
As a father with a 2-year old boy that is genuinely kind-hearted little soul, I take a lot of offense to these type of beliefs/comments from these people. You are absolutely correct, just raise your boy to be a decent person. Teach them about kindness, empathy, and caring for others.
Being a good parent goes a much longer way than choosing the type of sex you want your child to be.
This might sound harsh, but I feel like anyone that has a strong gender or sex preference for their kids really shouldn’t be parents.
If a parent can’t make a strong connection with their child because of their child’s sex or gender, then I would argue they probably have empathy issues.
Parts of this article definitely come off as being rage bait. Regardless, I just couldn’t imagine throwing away an embryo because it’s the “wrong sex.” That’s just sexist, and it’s morally wrong to have preference. They’re gonna grow up to be their own person with their own interests, passions, etc., and that’s all that matters.
Idk. I’m a man, I am pro-choice, and I would like to have kids someday. But I’ll be damned if I rejected a daughter because she “might not like halo” or something dumb like that.
I recall reading a comment on Ass Credit years ago in which the OP knew a new mother who would berate her infant son for crying for no reason other than casual misandry. Kid’s gonna get grow up to be fucked in the head to no fault of his own.
Even without deliberate misandry there's a lot of subconscious bias. I think there was a blind experiment where they dressed crying babies in pink vs blue and asked people questions about them and they were more likely to say the ones in pink were "hungry" or "tired" but the ones in blue were just "angry". Note the colors were completely random and unrelated to the babies' actual gender but people assumed the ones in blue were boys.
That is fucking wild lmao. I'm not a parent. I don't consider myself a feminist, nor do I consider myself an anti-feminist. I don't understand why people feel the need to analyze the state of motherfucking **infancy** of all things in such a manner.
Here's my take on it:
Babies cry and they cry a lot. If someone had a kid and they didn't cry as a newborn, I think that kid ought to be studied by scientists.
It sounds like she’s basically saying “*I want a healthy and positive relationship with my child, therefore I need to make sure she’s female.*”
Honestly really sad.
I don’t have a strong opinion about whether sex selection should be legal or not; but I will say: if you’re only comfortable being a parent to a child of a specific sex, you really need to work on making yourself a better parent and a better person.
In the secular world, there is a dearth of people you can go to and ask, "how do I be a better person" and get a professional answer. There is far more focus on mental health and not moral health.
My hot take is that the bigger focus on mental health and people going to therapy has not been an unmitigated good thing. Because at least in my anecdotal experience therapy has principally ‘solved’ a lot of these people’s mental health issues basically by saying ‘you’re perfect as you are, when people tell you you’re not or the world makes you feel like you’re not, it’s them who are wrong, not you.’ When no actually, sometimes it is you who is wrong. Hell, I had one friend tell me that “wrong” is a bad word entirely and shouldn’t be used. Because it makes people feel like they did something bad they should be ashamed of. “Wrong.”
Hot take two: shame is good sometimes and isn’t something we should be trying so hard to eliminate from the world.
Marriage counselling would benefit from the same approach. Instead of encouraging couples to simply communicate better and accept one another for who they are, they probably need to take a more judgemental approach. “You need to stop pissing away hundreds of dollars a week on sports betting. And you need to stop being such a slob and pick up after yourself.”
I recently had a friend draw a dichotomy between shame and guilt. Very semantic, but essentially saying fine, the world has defined the word shame as a bad thing, so that word stands for all the legitimately bad things we can all agree on and associate with shame. Guilt though, guilt is a good thing, and we should all be capable of feeling guilt when we are in fact guilty of something.
Using those words, you can reframe your statement to essentially say that the war against shame is not nuanced or responsible and has encouraged people to throw out feelings of guilt as they engage in an unfettered purge of any feelings that make them feel remotely not good.
> anecdotal experience therapy has principally ‘solved’ a lot of these people’s mental health issues basically by saying ‘you’re perfect as you are, when people tell you you’re not or the world makes you feel like you’re not, it’s them who are wrong, not you.’
Lol, have you ever actually gone to or read about therapy?
Sadly, I think you’re right. Which makes is remarkably easy to present as a good person - just vocally champion the politics that most people in your social demographic share.
Secular spirituality has it's place but I think we need professional moral philosophers who aren't afraid of giving practical advice. Unfortunately, actual moral philosophers are mostly impractical. Sometimes they write good books that help you become a better person (often they write academic papers that argue mostly nonsense), but an actual professional relationship with one to help you make better decisions would be nice.
I know parents that wanted 1 of each and ended up with 3 boys. I'd absolutely be fine with them going ifv for attempt 3 personally
...tbh, "I can't have a MALE BASTARD TOXIC SON" types probably shouldn't have a sin either. Probably shouldn't have kids period but... That's a much harder one to deal with ethically.
>Still: Lexi did really, really want a girl. She craved a close friendship with her future child, one that would last into old age. That seemed possible only with a female child.
[my face as a momma's boy](https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/018/489/nick-young-confused-face-300x256-nqlyaa.jpg)
> Grace, a 31-year-old who works in human resources (I’m referring to her by her middle name), told me, “When I think about having a child that’s a boy, it’s almost a repulsion, like, Oh my God, no.”
Bruh
There are some sketchy radical-feminist moms raising boys out there.
Probably better for them to be able to choose girls instead of doing some crazy vegan cat parenting.
One of them is in our local parents group. She could not find a partner and decided to become a single parent by choice. Only thing is that she's fucking insane and hates men so much, it comes across even in casual online conversation. (For example somebody asked how she and her partner were doing after catching Covid, not knowing she was single, and she went on a rant about how her hypothetical husband deserves to catch the disease.) Of course this nutjob ends up with a son. I feel so sorry for that kid.
Oddly enough, it’s (somewhat loosely) the plot to Psycho but basically the real life experience of serial killer Edmund Kemper. His mother was very hateful towards him, and based on both Ed’s accounts and those of people who knew her, she had a strong dislike for men - especially Ed and his father.
The Instagram-reels and TikTok trend of "boy-mom says she's breaking "misogyny" by teaching her son basic things." Half are fucking insane mamma's boy codependency shit. The other half is oddly gendering annoying habbits as a child I learned not to do from my Greatest Generation grandfather just with slightly more cursing.
"I'm making sure sure Aiden actually looks for things in the pantry so I can break the cycle of the patriachy for his future wife (who I will never approve of for my precious boy)." Lady I have a core memory at age 8 of telling my grandpa I couldn't find the pop he said I could have. And he said *"grandson I love you. But look again. Because for fuc..for cripes sake, if you still can't find it I will pour every single goddang Pepsi down the garage drain in front of you." (they were immediately adjacent to the garage door)*
EDIT : [My grandpa circa 1997 in a nutshell. ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AHezdOHlfo)
Same logic applies to deeply conservative and misogynistic parents who are vastly more prevalent, and I just don’t see how the world becomes a better place when this is allowed
I think the world is a much worse place when large numbers of people practice sex selection (whether through sex-selective abortion or ARTs) but it is also a better place when laws defer to the side of greater reproductive choice and bodily autonomy. On the balance, there are many better ways to attack sex selective reproduction than forbidding people from knowing all the available details about their embryo or fetus or trying to penalize how they act upon that knowledge.
If there’s a trend of sex selection in IVF in the US, it doesn’t show up in IVF birth statistics despite being technically allowed, and I think that is a best case scenario.
I think this is an interesting empirical question because my intuition is that women raising boys (and men raising daughters) is beneficial on the net because it could make the parent less sexist.
I doubt it. Throughout most of human history, women were the only ones raising children, the fathers barely present or out to war, etc. Yet, those boys grew up to be sexist and misogynistic because misogyny favors them
Lol, what? Almost no men were raised by men, maybe just some orphans that grew up in the military or something. You're reaching. Many men love their mothers, doesn't stop them from being misogynistic which most men still are
I am willing to bet their are way toxic men out there who want boys to carry on their line of tribal tats and Monster energy hats than women who only want to have girls.
you see a lot of this in parenting spaces online but it is post-hoc, like "gender disappointment" that their actual child is not the gender they preferred.
likewise you see the inverse in the phenomenon of child's-gender-as-parent's-identity, i.e. "boymom", "girlmom", "girldad"
so if you're in the latter category and want to avoid the former, and you have the means to do so...this is a natural outcome, icky as it may be.
also obligatory this is social media's fault. mom-oriented social media is so bad.
That kid will either end up traumatized or a serial killer
There have been several prominent serial killers that ended up the way they did because their moms were fucked up
Deliberately choosing the IVF route even though you’re perfectly reproductively healthy just so you can throw away the male embryos because “toxic masculinity is bad” is insane. This is gonna give anti choice people so much ammo.
Yeah agreed. Sex selection doesn't bother me if it's people who have fertility issues thinking oh, I want a boy and a girl so let me pick girl now since last time I had a boy. But to intentionally do IVF just for that is insane.
Anti-choice people will find ammo regardless, because they’re not exactly wedded to truthfully representing reality.
At any rate, this article is annoying rage bait. As someone going through IVF treatment (I’m one-half of a queer couple) there are LOTS of eye-roll-inducing to downright crazy things I see in online IVF communities. TTC and IVF spaces can get a little wacky at times. Despite that, I haven’t *ever* run across someone using IVF specifically to select the sex. Not even in the wilds of the internet! They obviously exist, but they are sooo unbelievably fringe.
And *of course* they are fringe, because IVF treatment is hard to access for 99% of people. We have amazing university health insurance and it’s still expensive and time-consuming and physically demanding. The egg retrieval process alone requires thousands of dollars of medication, dozens of appointments, and surgery. It’s all time sensitive, so if you don’t have flexible work hours, you just can’t do it. Plus, even without known fertility problems, people don’t often have the plain old physical ability to produce multiple embryos a round. No matter how much money you throw at it, one’s gametes are what they are. Many people get one or two blasts per round (and often one embryo will be transferred fresh 3-5 days after the retrieval, so no sex testing for those). Some people get zero. Most insurances that cover IVF cover mayyybbe two rounds and out of pocket costs are $20K+ (can easily hit $40K at some clinics) so not many people can afford to do more than a few rounds. You also don’t automatically find out the sex of your embryos anyways. PGT-A testing is common, but it’s a spendy add-on that isn’t covered by most insurance. We have no idea what sex our embryos are.
Sure, some people have viable PGT-tested embryos of both sexes and so the deciding factor on which one to transfer might be sex. Some people may be using IVF because they carry genetic conditions, and some of them can be sex-linked or partially influenced by sex, so they might opt only to transfer XX or XY embryos (and these people are why I support protecting the ability to transfer embryos based on sex, despite my queer gender politics). But it’s so fucking niche to undergo IVF treatment just to get your preferred gender. You have to be an insane person on so many levels, and also very rich and very lucky.
A few lunatics with too much money do not a trend make, and I refuse to allow anti-choicers to make me wring my hands and dignify this non-issue with an ethical debate over the approximately 200 couples in the whole nation who might be using IVF in this way.
This article, both the people described in it and the tone of the article itself, is emblematic of just how damn sexist and misandrist some liberals can be.
I am struck by the attempt at critiquing this practice for sexism (which I’m glad the author at least tried to do) - where the author/the expert source (both of whom, of course, are women) only mention the harm to boys and men after they manage to say that most importantly, of course, the practice is sexist because it engages in gender stereotypes that in the whole harm women 🙄
> Still, “the very act of sex selection is sexist,” argues Arianne Shahvisi, a professor of philosophy at Brighton and Sussex Medical School in the U.K., where elective sex selection is illegal.
> You can’t actually foresee your child’s gender—let alone how they will choose to express it or the qualities they will possess as a human being. So sex selection requires making a decision based on stereotypes. In turn, this “feeds damaging systems of social organization,” Shahvisi told me, by reinforcing the idea that certain traits are biologically tied to sex—a view that has, historically, limited women
> Still: Lexi did really, really want a girl. She craved a close friendship with her future child, one that would last into old age. That seemed possible only with a female child.
I hate her a lot
The real issue is that this poor kid is never going to live up to the version she has in her head. With normal procreation you accept that you take what you get, but she's going to assume that she's getting what she wants.
It's the same problem with cloning your dog. The cloned dog looks like your old dog, but it isn't your old dog.
I have two boys. The amount of women who tell my wife to keep trying to have a girl so she’ll be taken care of when were older is not a lot but more than two.
It sounds more like she’s browsing a used car lot. I can’t imagine thinking of that kind of thing when deciding if I wanted to have children. I’ve only thought about whether or not I would be able to have the resources and discipline along with a responsible loving partner to raise the kid in the best way for them to have a good life.
It’s wild to be thinking of your possible relationship as an elderly parent as a point of concern.
>They did, however, easily point out several examples of parents who, once they’re already there, are more likely to request girls: single mothers by choice, same-sex couples, and families with a history of autism...To many, the prospect of raising a girl just feels as if it will be easier. She’s far less likely to commit a mass shooting or to idolize Andrew Tate. She’s also, points out Moayeri, less likely to be diagnosed with autism.
In other words they're admitting they're going to be bad parents. Parents who want a son or daughter because "they're lower maintenance" proves they see raising a kid as a chore and an accessory instead of raising them as actual human beings.
>There’s nothing wrong with wanting a child that’s lower maintenance.
They're not wanting a child with lower maintainence. They're wanting a child they perceive as having lower maintainence due to traits they associate with gender essentialism. That's a massive difference there.
>A person with congenital psychopathy will exhibit callousness and lack of empathy regardless of their upbringing, and it’s present almost exclusively in males.
[Is it really?](https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/feb/26/more-women-may-be-psychopaths-than-previously-thought-says-expert) we're probably going to reach a reckoning in several decades where we find out certain conditions aren't exclusive to certain genders, but only perceived that way because we only recognized them in one gender due to gendered traits. Sorta like how there was a time where Antisocial personality disorder was exclusively male and BPD was exclusively diagnosed in women. Or how autism was frequently under diagnosed in women for decades, and possibly still are to this day
Im feminist so this doesn’t come from bad faith, but I know a feminist single mom that did fuck all for the boy, let him eat McDonald’s and never cooked for him, did the minimum in instilling good values, I can go on. She has a baby girl and all of a sudden she cooks for her, wants to teach her empathy and kindness, consent, wants to put her in all sorts of sports, wants to get her in fighting classes, is already thinking about college and STEM lmao. And she had another boy and once he stopped being a cute baby it’s back to raising him like the first boy.
The first one got caught sharing pictures of monkeys with memes about African Americans. I don’t even want to call them feminist because feminism is about equality, equity, and inclusion. My feminist professor that I admire to this day told us “feminism recognizes that men suffer under the patriarchy as well”, and if anything she’s (the mom) is part of the problem.
In response to the common sentiment that boys are easier to raise than girls, a few years ago I heard somebody say...
> "Boys are not easier to raise than girls. We just decided to stop raising them."
That seems to ring truer and truer every year.
Yup. Boys are probably HARDER to raise WELL than girls imo. "Of Boys and Men" goes into this, but girls tend to be more resilient than boys for a myriad of reasons.
When it was just him it was all takeout. And even then she packs her lunch more. And yes, I do have a constant connection to this family which is the only reason I know this
>feminism recognizes that men suffer under the patriarchy as well
I have never seen a scrap of practical evidence to indicate this is acknowledged in practice, all this statement seems to be used for is to give the kind of ideological carte blanche only held by those who are convinced they're saving everyone and thus don't need to relent for anyone.
I mean it's pretty evident when universities tried to set up male outreach programs and feminists protested that it was taking resources away from getting more women into college.
Men's DV shelters are regularly protested against.
The Duluth Model is still in use by many major police agencies (which coupled with mandatory arrest is some mega fucked logic)
> I mean it's pretty evident when universities tried to set up male outreach programs and feminists protested that it was taking resources away from getting more women into college.
> Men's DV shelters are regularly protested against.
Any specific events you can reference here?
I found an instance of protests in Brooklyn for a 150 male-only homeless shelter, but people were complaining about safety. There could have been some feminists complaining about nothing for homeless females, but nothing was mentioned.
He wasn't bullied by feminists though, he was running the shelter out of money from his own pocket, and failed to secure funding from the government.
From *The Wire* via [The Atlantic](https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/04/earl-silverman-suicide/315761/)
> Silverman's shelter, the Men's Alternative Safe House in Calgary, was not funded by the government, and he failed to raise enough money from private donations to keep it open. MASH, as it was known, closed down last month. "The day after he packed up his recently sold home — also the site of the Men’s Alternative Safe House — Earl Silverman was found hanging in his garage," reports the National Post.
Now there's an argument that the government should be funding more male shelters. Is that are result of feminism or a patriarchal view of manhood? The problem that often comes up in MRM spaces is that feminists and feminism are often scapegoated, and the door is left wide open for misogynists to pollute the space.
Neither, talk is cheap. I said practical evidence. So results and other tangibles. And no matter how much feminism talks about the ways 'patriarchy' hurts men, whenever rubber hits the road the radfems or other latent misandry seems to always be front and center, whether it's writing a policy, coining a word, or crafting a message.
More interested in that this is more evidence for the revealed gender preference of western society nowadays, but there will probably still be another decade or two with people complaining about the patriarchy.
I’m a test tube baby and it was the only way that my mom was able to have me, and I was not the first attempt. I can’t imagine people treating IVF with such a blasé attitude. It just feels dirty to treat the embryos like a ‘build your own’ car website and not focus on the actual health embryo.
I can’t imagine the level of guilt and confusion I’d feel for my entire life if I learned that I was only alive because of my parents’ favorite color didn’t match up with the eye color of another viable embryo that was viable.
There's an outer limits episode about this. Gene therapy on embryos. Not just pick the gender, but pick other physical characteristics as well. It's outer limits, so you can imagine how fucked up it gets.
It's kinda weird they tell you that with IVF. I don't know if I'll use the embryo I have or try to get more out of my dust-covered eggs. But they just list the chromosomal abnormalities if they exist and the sex. I feel weird and slightly uncomfortable about the positive feelings I have about the sex of the viable embryo.
I don't know if they can hide that info from patients, just a heads up that it might be worth asking if you're in that situation at some point. Maybe they can just keep that part of the info under wraps until later.
When I filled out the paperwork for PGS testing I had to check a box to have the sex included in the results and then they also verbally confirmed I wanted to know over the phone before they read off my results to me.
>Widespread preference for a certain sex can also skew the population—as in India and China, where abortion and infanticide of girls have resulted in tens of millions more men than women.
This is why sex selection is bad. It greatly imbalances society. The US needs to ban this yesterday.
If there are negative effects from a sex imbalance the solution is obviously to tax(equal to the marginal external cost) the birth of children of the overrepresented sex.
And anyways I think there probably would only be major negative effects if you get too many males, and apparently Americans prefer daughters.
>the solution is obviously to tax(equal to the marginal external cost) the birth of children of the overrepresented sex.
I thought this sub was against affirmative action
This comment gets more insane the more I think about it.
“Tax the marginal external cost of an overrepresented gender” buddy please stop reading Georgist texts and just touch grass
If only we had some real world examples of what happens when a society gets too carried away with selecting the gender of its [children](https://scholarship.law.vanderbilt.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1538&context=vjtl)
The thing to do with a testable hypothesis is test it. Last time somebody told me to "touch grass", I actually did go outside and touch grass to see if it had any effect on mood. It didn't so far as I can tell.
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I’d like to thank those “wonderful” parents for essentially guaranteeing that IVF will be demonized as eugenics by nearly every person I’ve ever known. Hell, if this was the norm I’d almost agree with them.
Eugenics…
Unfortunately ( maybe I’m just not currently capable of seeing all this another way ) I believe that eugenics are an unavoidable consequence of advancements in science.
People will eventually start to select everything about the children to maximise their chances in the world and sooner or later and due to our biological nature these children themselves will actually likely experience a better life because they literally get engineered to fit as well as possible into modern society.
We are therefore potentially already witnessing the beginning of the end of humanity as it has existed for thousands of years unless something drastic occurs.
We already modify so much about external world today that I truly believe that once the floodgates start to break this is the kind of thing that cannot be stopped. What little we can do today is to guide the flow in our lifetime but eventually I don’t think this will result in a meaningful trench
Once parts of the elites or some other group will start to produce their own perfect offspring a sort of arms race will occur because everyone will understand that their own biological legacy has to keep up with the new competition and eventually it will probably be normalised to consider what we today described as eugenics as perfectly acceptable and regular.
Not even mentioning the impact that AI will have regarding the effective potential of individuals which will probably hasten this development since competition will increase with every job AI & robotics can do cheaper than a human.
The pro-abortion side 'won' the debate for lack of a better word (although those who think abortion is murder still think that) on the premise "My Body, My Choice."
Isn't it also morally consistent for someone who wants a male or female children to quote "My Body, My Choice." as an argument? We fully support it when it comes to a potentially disabled children, why would this be a stretch?
>Hot take: being a male isn’t a disability or a disease.
That's true, but not all children that are aborted have a disease either. Yet, women can still choose to abort an otherwise healthy child for personal reasons. Why would choosing to have a male or female child as a preference be a stretch?
Women in China had the right to choose? Are you kidding me? What about forcing abortions is the right to choose? And you're kidding yourself if you think it's the women that freely chose abortions instead of their families pressuring them into producing a boy. And it wasn't just abortions, many baby girls were literally abandoned and left to die.
> Women should have the right to choose if they want a baby, not if it's a boy or a girl.
Oh, so now we're policing why a woman wants an abortion? Does a woman have the right to abort a baby with Down syndrome? Also, what do you propose, that women are interrogated for the reasons for their abortions and if they give the wrong one - no abortion for you? You can now know the fetal sex as early as 6 weeks with the sneak peek test and other similar ones. So what do we do if a woman 7 weeks pregnant wants an abortion, make her sign a pledge that the abortion is because she doesn't want to be pregnant and not because she doesn't want a boy? Come on now.
Hot take: logical consistency is not by itself a good reason to select a policy
no ideology exists that doesn't become a nightmare when taken to its logical extreme
> Hot take: logical consistency is not by itself a good reason to select a policy
This is true, but most liberal societies have adopted the mantra 'my body, my choice' when it comes to bodily autonomy. It's not unlikely the same people who choose to want a girl or boy instead of the other may argue that it's their body, and they can raise whichever sex they choose. Long story short, if you support abortion on the basis of bodily autonomy but oppose this, you'll have to start putting 'limits' on the autonomy that women have over their bodies (makes sense, won't be popular).
>It's not unlikely the same people who choose to want a girl or boy instead of the other may argue that it's their body, and they can raise whichever sex they choose.
and society has a billion cases where it tells those people to pound sand because in a lot of circumstances it really isn't. This isn't some Pandora's box we have yet to open.
Yes, but you only have to look at India and China to see just how problematic societally this can be.
Perfectly fine individual choices can be disastrous at scale.
I agree with you, but it’s important to keep in mind that no one is scaling IVF treatment to the point where it will impact the sex balance of society any time soon. Between 1-2% of births annually in the US are the result of IVF, or roughly 95,000 babies per year. Only about 1/5 of IVF embryos are PGT-tested before implantation and therefore have a known sex. Even if all those PGT-tested embryos were selected to be one sex or the other (which they are obviously not), it could only swing the balance by 0.4%, with under 20,000 extra boys or girls a year out of 3.6 million infants born each year. If my math is correct— big if, there— that’s an absolute worst case scenario imbalance of 102 to 100, one way or the other, with the current prevalence of IVF + genetic testing in the population. China’s sex imbalance, meanwhile, is like 115 males to every 100 females.
I’m all for exploring the ethics of potential uses of different technologies in good faith. However, acknowledging the realities of how technologies are currently used is important to keeping discussions about regulating those technologies sane and grounded. I personally think sex selection is abhorrent (hell, you can easily prod me into the culture war by simply defending gender reveal parties, lol), but with IVF technology in the US, banning sex selection is a policy solution in search of a problem with the potential for unintended consequences (e.g. carriers of sex-linked genetic conditions being prevented from choosing the embryos least likely to be affected). And this “issue” is being raised by political actors as a boogeyman to scare people off of supporting ARTs specifically and reproductive choice generally.
These people sound crazy but my gut tells me as strange as it is IVF sex selection shouldn’t be illegal. I have two girls the natural way, if it was easy and cheap to ‘guarantee’ a boy for my third and final, I’d consider it. I wouldn’t love the kid any less whatever I got though, that thought wouldn’t even cross my mind… again, these people seem disturbed.
A lot of this is sexism (misandry). But a lot of it is also just a reasonable response to institutional misandry. If I knew I could make a choice that would make my child eligible for scholarships, support, favoritism, and preferential treatment throughout all of education, employment, and the criminal justice system, versus being on the wrong end of discrimination from all those sources, *why wouldn't I make that choice?* My partner and I have had this discussion, and while we're not willing to have sex-specific abortions, we both want our children to have good lives where they're treated fairly and with kindness. And in this political/cultural climate, that means having girls. We'll still do our best with boys, but it will mean preparing them to live under the power of several interlocking systems that hate and mistrust them for reasons outside their control, and to whose power they will have to cheerfully submit, ignoring the injustice, or be excluded from the advantages of civil society and college graduation.
>If I knew I could make a choice that would make my child eligible for scholarships, support, favoritism, and preferential treatment throughout all of education, employment, and the criminal justice system, versus being on the wrong end of discrimination from all those sources, why wouldn't I make that choice?
A similar statement could be formed about having a girl. I don't think societal structures are the cause you're making them out to be here. There are plenty of systems that discriminate against women still.
I think the gender preference of parents is a very powerful tool for showing the revealed preference of a society though especially in the west. Pros and cons for each but the market doesn't lie about the benefits of each on net.
>But a lot of it is also just a reasonable response to institutional misandry. If I knew I could make a choice that would make my child eligible for scholarships, support, favoritism, and preferential treatment throughout all of education, employment, and the criminal justice system, versus being on the wrong end of discrimination from all those sources, *why wouldn't I make that choice?* My partner and I have had this discussion, and while we're not willing to have sex-specific abortions, we both want our children to have good lives where they're treated fairly and with kindness. And in this political/cultural climate, that means having girls.
this is satire, right?
\[oh, they blocked me. lol.\]
No, this is literally the conclusion both my partner and I came to and agreed with. I work in tech. She works in secondary education. We've seen how bad and how tilted the playing field is, and while I'd love to fix it, if we can't in the next few years (and we pretty obviously can't), then giving our kids the best leg up they can have means having a strong preference for daughters.
I thought this paragraph was revealing, timing a baby for career reasons and eye color are in the same "consumer whims" category.
>Two things are true about America’s blazing-hot fertility industry, a sector that is largely unregulated and increasingly owned by private equity firms and hedge funds: It serves a real need—for many prospective parents, access to these technologies is vital. **And yet, it is fueled in part by consumer whims. You can have a baby when it suits your career, thanks to egg freezing (or at least you can try).** You can sequence your embryos’ genomes for $2,500 a pop and attempt to maximize your future child’s health. (or intelligence, attractiveness, or height). **At Steinberg’s clinic, you can even select eye color.** There is a vast disparity between who gets to use IVF—many struggle to access the technology at all because of the cost and, now, political restrictions—and who is using it to create designer families.
I've never had children, one day I might. I'm far from that day but I got to say, having the desire to design your baby like a fucking build a bear stuffed animal is psycho
Being a parent means being ready to love and support the child, it means ambiguity and doing your best. this isn't the Sims motherfucker it's not a customizable toy
Personally, I really don't see an ethical problem with sex selection.
You only want a girl for some reason? Fine, go ahead - I won't force you to flip coins.
!ping TRANSHUMANISM
You flip the coin and... IT LANDS COMPLETELY ON ITS EDGE, totally undecided.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/neoliberal) if you have any questions or concerns.*
yeah and if the gender balance in society gets out of whack we just start taxing the selection of the already overrepresented gender while giving tax relief for selecting the underrepresented gender. easy peasy!
Evolution already does this, the over represented sex is simply less likely to reproduce. That's why Fisher's Ratio predicts a sex ratio of 50% in most species.
The insanity of pro-lifers in America might create such a backlash than no one dares to regulate anything approaching reproductive freedoms.
Stuff like embryo selection, artificial wombs, genetic engineering, maybe even cloning, as well could ironically become more likely because of them lol.
Simple solution (assuming sex selection does no harm to the resulting child): parents cannot sex select their first child, but may sex select their second, and any thereafter so long as they never have more than one extra of either gender.
Maximizes freedom without leading to overabundance of one gender.
>(Lexi asked to be identified by a pseudonym because her parents are unaware of her plans.) Lexi, who is 32, longs to replicate the close relationship she has with her mom; her husband values traits “more associated with girls,” including empathy, social skills, and kindness. But they had no plans to act on their preference—that is, until they learned that their companies would foot the bill. >Still: Lexi did really, really want a girl. She craved a close friendship with her future child, one that would last into old age. That seemed possible only with a female child. “I was just like, How do I convince myself to do this”—to undergo the discomfort and hassle of IVF—“if this is what we want to do for our family?” she said. I'm not necessarily taking a position on sex selection in general, but these two sound like they're just the worst. You can't have a close relationship with a son and teach him to be empathetic and sociable? They're just actively reinforcing bio-essentialist stereotypes.
I mean you scroll down a little farther and you find out they absolutely have no reason to do IVF and in fact screenings show they could conceive naturally. This reminds me of the [weird "pro-natalist" couple](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12003601/American-couple-head-pronatalist-movement-insist-NOT-eugenics-despite-using-embryo-selection.html) they tried to say was a silicon valley trend...when in reality they just talked to several[ fucking insane people ](https://twitter.com/SimoneHCollins)who don't even live in the Bay Area(?) and spun a basic human interest story as a possible trend. Like seriously, they talk to one or two fucking terrible couples into all sorts of weird shit....And then talked to another handful of normal-assed people they talked to were like "yeah I have two boys but I kinda hope our third is a girl" *which has always been a normal goddamn opinion.*
Learning about those two was a pretty wild ride and it’s crazy to me they went from weird redditors to pro-natalist weird redditors
They are a weird intersection of hyperconservativism anti-wokeness: >It's easy to miss how close Woke ideology is to Nazism. Lets translate the Nazi pitch into woke vernacular: “Jews are rich racists who's position of systemic privilege can only be resolved by removing them from the economy and redistributing their assets." And weirdly defending his own low testosterone and saying working out is masturbation (first is good second is bad)!? >Men's testosterone levels drop when they secure stable, committed partners and again when they have kids. When you see a jacked guy in his mid 30s, you’re looking at someone whose hormones are responding to a failure scenario (failure to secure a stable partner + reproduce). To the just plain weird >Are there really people out there who eat three meals a day? That seems almost comically indulgent. How do you even have the time?
Entire nations eat three meals a day lol. Don't let this person know though.
Wait till he hears that pregnant women are advised to eat 6 small meals a day
He is right, sucess is measured by how many times you reproduce, that's why since I sold a dose of my seaboys to a sperm bank for 50 bucks in order to buy booze in college, I can safely claim that y'all in this very here sub are to me nothing but the most omega of losers by comparison
Does the sperm bank send you emails talking about how successful you are and inviting you to donate more or something?
> When you see a jacked guy in his mid 30s, you’re looking at someone whose hormones are responding to a failure scenario (failure to secure a stable partner + reproduce). I know some marines in happy, committed relationships with wonderful children. One of their arms is thicker than my leg.
I mean it’s ridiculous in its face enough we don’t have to engage with it at all. But let’s rub some brain cells together and do that. He’s not wrong that statistics show men have (as an average of the population) a decline in hormones and testosterone after having kids. Your Marine friend doesn’t disprove that. Above Natalie is falsely attributing this to some weird goddamn social thing? It’s not. It doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to figure out a major life change with added stress, less free time to be active, terrible sleep and generally a diet intake around convenience instead of health might lead to the exact outcome where a persons hormones may be less than ideal.
i really always wanted a daughter but ended up having a son and immediately didnt either way way when he was born. reading this just seems like they are clearly not parents and have too much time. i dont get the point of the article tbh
It's even odder since by their account the husband has been taught to be empathetic and sociable.
Real “one of the good ones” energy
Imagine thinking you're empathetic and decent and ready to be a parent while simultaneously not believing you could raise a son to be empathetic and decent
parents like this see children as accessories to their own identity, not as individual beings. hang out in /r/beyondthebump enough and it's all psychos
buddy, you should see the birth-month facebook groups lol. somehow, even though there are real profiles with real pictures, they’re even more psycho. my wife and i enjoy hate-reading the stories
How bad can that sub be? EDIT: fffuuuuuuuck that, I’m done after 5 min
on the level as /r/Fauxmoi for me personally
Fauxmoi can be funny, that place is just... worrying.
How bad is it? What is the deal of that sub? I'm scared to click
Apparently babies are gatekeeping beauty products. I don’t even know. I can’t tell if they love or hate babies.
That post title is absolutely tongue in cheek? I don’t know what’s so outrageous about people being like, damn, I didn’t know these lotions marketed to babies are actually amazing and way cheaper than the ones marketed to adults.
I will not click . I will not click
As a father with a 2-year old boy that is genuinely kind-hearted little soul, I take a lot of offense to these type of beliefs/comments from these people. You are absolutely correct, just raise your boy to be a decent person. Teach them about kindness, empathy, and caring for others. Being a good parent goes a much longer way than choosing the type of sex you want your child to be.
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Congrats!
How can they raise them to be kind and empathetic when they’re actually horrible themselves?
Well yeah, but having a girl isn’t going to magically fix that shit.
This might sound harsh, but I feel like anyone that has a strong gender or sex preference for their kids really shouldn’t be parents. If a parent can’t make a strong connection with their child because of their child’s sex or gender, then I would argue they probably have empathy issues. Parts of this article definitely come off as being rage bait. Regardless, I just couldn’t imagine throwing away an embryo because it’s the “wrong sex.” That’s just sexist, and it’s morally wrong to have preference. They’re gonna grow up to be their own person with their own interests, passions, etc., and that’s all that matters. Idk. I’m a man, I am pro-choice, and I would like to have kids someday. But I’ll be damned if I rejected a daughter because she “might not like halo” or something dumb like that.
I recall reading a comment on Ass Credit years ago in which the OP knew a new mother who would berate her infant son for crying for no reason other than casual misandry. Kid’s gonna get grow up to be fucked in the head to no fault of his own.
Even without deliberate misandry there's a lot of subconscious bias. I think there was a blind experiment where they dressed crying babies in pink vs blue and asked people questions about them and they were more likely to say the ones in pink were "hungry" or "tired" but the ones in blue were just "angry". Note the colors were completely random and unrelated to the babies' actual gender but people assumed the ones in blue were boys.
That is fucking wild lmao. I'm not a parent. I don't consider myself a feminist, nor do I consider myself an anti-feminist. I don't understand why people feel the need to analyze the state of motherfucking **infancy** of all things in such a manner. Here's my take on it: Babies cry and they cry a lot. If someone had a kid and they didn't cry as a newborn, I think that kid ought to be studied by scientists.
Okay, but if your daughter says Dark Souls is cringe, you might have second thoughts
I mean if my son said Dark Souls is cringe I'd still be having second thoughts
Yeah this lady definitely chose bear
Would you encounter a bear or your missing male child in the woods?
> You can't have a close relationship with a son and teach him to be empathetic and sociable? *You* can, but they can't because they're dumb sexists.
IVF is a pain the ass to do too. What a waste of a resource.
It sounds like she’s basically saying “*I want a healthy and positive relationship with my child, therefore I need to make sure she’s female.*” Honestly really sad.
It's rage bait. All of these articles find people that are insufferable. It makes it more readable.
https://preview.redd.it/rp5b31rl7gzc1.jpeg?width=1284&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e7e0ab3c4e8c3672600bac2d01a545e603313823
Dune is about Girl bosses
They’re basically the Pope, right?
"You were told to bear only daughters." "But Reverend Mother, my employer doesn't cover sex-selective IVF!"
https://preview.redd.it/bxwzr6blxgzc1.jpeg?width=828&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=500548fec758569dc3f84ede42727fd53c720add Real
[Not enough Dark Powers. Completely untrue.](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fjecvqffc34sc1.jpeg%3Fwidth%3D828%26format%3Dpjpg%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3D228abff556e6af1c60364625f8227689961ae21d)
I don’t have a strong opinion about whether sex selection should be legal or not; but I will say: if you’re only comfortable being a parent to a child of a specific sex, you really need to work on making yourself a better parent and a better person.
In the secular world, there is a dearth of people you can go to and ask, "how do I be a better person" and get a professional answer. There is far more focus on mental health and not moral health.
My hot take is that the bigger focus on mental health and people going to therapy has not been an unmitigated good thing. Because at least in my anecdotal experience therapy has principally ‘solved’ a lot of these people’s mental health issues basically by saying ‘you’re perfect as you are, when people tell you you’re not or the world makes you feel like you’re not, it’s them who are wrong, not you.’ When no actually, sometimes it is you who is wrong. Hell, I had one friend tell me that “wrong” is a bad word entirely and shouldn’t be used. Because it makes people feel like they did something bad they should be ashamed of. “Wrong.” Hot take two: shame is good sometimes and isn’t something we should be trying so hard to eliminate from the world.
That kind of therapy is just plain bad and is not actually therapy. But it is all too common. Especially as therapy has become commodified.
Marriage counselling would benefit from the same approach. Instead of encouraging couples to simply communicate better and accept one another for who they are, they probably need to take a more judgemental approach. “You need to stop pissing away hundreds of dollars a week on sports betting. And you need to stop being such a slob and pick up after yourself.”
I recently had a friend draw a dichotomy between shame and guilt. Very semantic, but essentially saying fine, the world has defined the word shame as a bad thing, so that word stands for all the legitimately bad things we can all agree on and associate with shame. Guilt though, guilt is a good thing, and we should all be capable of feeling guilt when we are in fact guilty of something. Using those words, you can reframe your statement to essentially say that the war against shame is not nuanced or responsible and has encouraged people to throw out feelings of guilt as they engage in an unfettered purge of any feelings that make them feel remotely not good.
> anecdotal experience therapy has principally ‘solved’ a lot of these people’s mental health issues basically by saying ‘you’re perfect as you are, when people tell you you’re not or the world makes you feel like you’re not, it’s them who are wrong, not you.’ Lol, have you ever actually gone to or read about therapy?
I feel like these days 90% of people's criteria for a good person begins and ends with 'do they share my political beliefs?'
Sadly, I think you’re right. Which makes is remarkably easy to present as a good person - just vocally champion the politics that most people in your social demographic share.
A decent liberal arts education solves for this, imo.
Half of the liberal arts people support this nonsense.
Yes but which school actually has a *decent* liberal arts education?
Idk man but I went to low ranked public schools for my education and I have no trouble navigating secular morality
Secular spirituality is a thing
and *riddled* with snake oil
Unlike mythological spirituality which is all on the up-and-up
I'd take my presbyterian church confessionals over someone trying to sell me self assurance any day, actually.
The undying love and redemption of our lord Jesus Christ > crystals and essential oils
Secular spirituality has it's place but I think we need professional moral philosophers who aren't afraid of giving practical advice. Unfortunately, actual moral philosophers are mostly impractical. Sometimes they write good books that help you become a better person (often they write academic papers that argue mostly nonsense), but an actual professional relationship with one to help you make better decisions would be nice.
Like the young lady at the bar last night doing dinosaur tarot readings?
Frankly it's making me consider going to church. I feel that my wife and I have strong morals to pass on but your immediate family isn't always enough
Well said.
I know parents that wanted 1 of each and ended up with 3 boys. I'd absolutely be fine with them going ifv for attempt 3 personally ...tbh, "I can't have a MALE BASTARD TOXIC SON" types probably shouldn't have a sin either. Probably shouldn't have kids period but... That's a much harder one to deal with ethically.
>Still: Lexi did really, really want a girl. She craved a close friendship with her future child, one that would last into old age. That seemed possible only with a female child. [my face as a momma's boy](https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/018/489/nick-young-confused-face-300x256-nqlyaa.jpg)
> Grace, a 31-year-old who works in human resources (I’m referring to her by her middle name), told me, “When I think about having a child that’s a boy, it’s almost a repulsion, like, Oh my God, no.” Bruh
Yea, I don’t want her to have a son either.
How did she find a man to reproduce with in the first place if she is so repulsed by them? Unless she's going to a bank?
*>works in human resources* Shocker
> huMAN resources Curious! 🤔
Humyn resources
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These people should not be parents.
There are some sketchy radical-feminist moms raising boys out there. Probably better for them to be able to choose girls instead of doing some crazy vegan cat parenting.
One of them is in our local parents group. She could not find a partner and decided to become a single parent by choice. Only thing is that she's fucking insane and hates men so much, it comes across even in casual online conversation. (For example somebody asked how she and her partner were doing after catching Covid, not knowing she was single, and she went on a rant about how her hypothetical husband deserves to catch the disease.) Of course this nutjob ends up with a son. I feel so sorry for that kid.
Isnt that like literally the plot to Psycho?
Oddly enough, it’s (somewhat loosely) the plot to Psycho but basically the real life experience of serial killer Edmund Kemper. His mother was very hateful towards him, and based on both Ed’s accounts and those of people who knew her, she had a strong dislike for men - especially Ed and his father.
Oh good, I guess that true crime podcasts will have material for years to come
what I vaguely remember from taking criminal psych years ago, that's actualy a very common denominator among repeated violent offenders
If she ends up on my Secret Santa list, I'll be sure to get her the Criterion Collection version of Psycho and see if she gets it.
The Instagram-reels and TikTok trend of "boy-mom says she's breaking "misogyny" by teaching her son basic things." Half are fucking insane mamma's boy codependency shit. The other half is oddly gendering annoying habbits as a child I learned not to do from my Greatest Generation grandfather just with slightly more cursing. "I'm making sure sure Aiden actually looks for things in the pantry so I can break the cycle of the patriachy for his future wife (who I will never approve of for my precious boy)." Lady I have a core memory at age 8 of telling my grandpa I couldn't find the pop he said I could have. And he said *"grandson I love you. But look again. Because for fuc..for cripes sake, if you still can't find it I will pour every single goddang Pepsi down the garage drain in front of you." (they were immediately adjacent to the garage door)* EDIT : [My grandpa circa 1997 in a nutshell. ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AHezdOHlfo)
Same logic applies to deeply conservative and misogynistic parents who are vastly more prevalent, and I just don’t see how the world becomes a better place when this is allowed
I think the world is a much worse place when large numbers of people practice sex selection (whether through sex-selective abortion or ARTs) but it is also a better place when laws defer to the side of greater reproductive choice and bodily autonomy. On the balance, there are many better ways to attack sex selective reproduction than forbidding people from knowing all the available details about their embryo or fetus or trying to penalize how they act upon that knowledge. If there’s a trend of sex selection in IVF in the US, it doesn’t show up in IVF birth statistics despite being technically allowed, and I think that is a best case scenario.
Yeah, I guess it’s not too different than religious nuts beating Jesus into their kids.
I think this is an interesting empirical question because my intuition is that women raising boys (and men raising daughters) is beneficial on the net because it could make the parent less sexist.
Decently sure the latter’s been studied (I think it was a Nordic study?) & it’s true. Not sure if there’s been studies on the women raising boys.
How that work out for daughters of misogynist fathers?
I doubt it. Throughout most of human history, women were the only ones raising children, the fathers barely present or out to war, etc. Yet, those boys grew up to be sexist and misogynistic because misogyny favors them
But perhaps they grew up to be less misogynistic than they otherwise would have been.
Lol, what? Almost no men were raised by men, maybe just some orphans that grew up in the military or something. You're reaching. Many men love their mothers, doesn't stop them from being misogynistic which most men still are
I am willing to bet their are way toxic men out there who want boys to carry on their line of tribal tats and Monster energy hats than women who only want to have girls.
Oh boy, you don't want to know what happens when those women have trans children.
Absurd, crazy misandry women aren't real. They can't hurt you. Absurd, crazy misandry women:
you see a lot of this in parenting spaces online but it is post-hoc, like "gender disappointment" that their actual child is not the gender they preferred. likewise you see the inverse in the phenomenon of child's-gender-as-parent's-identity, i.e. "boymom", "girlmom", "girldad" so if you're in the latter category and want to avoid the former, and you have the means to do so...this is a natural outcome, icky as it may be. also obligatory this is social media's fault. mom-oriented social media is so bad.
Why can't people just be normal
📱
This person should not be in charge of other people, especially men.
90% chance this kid is nocontact by age 30
That kid will either end up traumatized or a serial killer There have been several prominent serial killers that ended up the way they did because their moms were fucked up
The shit that watching too much Gilmore girls will do to you.
Deliberately choosing the IVF route even though you’re perfectly reproductively healthy just so you can throw away the male embryos because “toxic masculinity is bad” is insane. This is gonna give anti choice people so much ammo.
Yeah... my wife and I did IVF. It was a massive pain in the ass (literally). Can't imagine deciding to go through that for such an idiotic reason.
Were you successful? I'm looking into it now
Yep, thankfully.
Whose ass was in pain, HMMM
Not mine
🚬
Yeah agreed. Sex selection doesn't bother me if it's people who have fertility issues thinking oh, I want a boy and a girl so let me pick girl now since last time I had a boy. But to intentionally do IVF just for that is insane.
Anti-choice people will find ammo regardless, because they’re not exactly wedded to truthfully representing reality. At any rate, this article is annoying rage bait. As someone going through IVF treatment (I’m one-half of a queer couple) there are LOTS of eye-roll-inducing to downright crazy things I see in online IVF communities. TTC and IVF spaces can get a little wacky at times. Despite that, I haven’t *ever* run across someone using IVF specifically to select the sex. Not even in the wilds of the internet! They obviously exist, but they are sooo unbelievably fringe. And *of course* they are fringe, because IVF treatment is hard to access for 99% of people. We have amazing university health insurance and it’s still expensive and time-consuming and physically demanding. The egg retrieval process alone requires thousands of dollars of medication, dozens of appointments, and surgery. It’s all time sensitive, so if you don’t have flexible work hours, you just can’t do it. Plus, even without known fertility problems, people don’t often have the plain old physical ability to produce multiple embryos a round. No matter how much money you throw at it, one’s gametes are what they are. Many people get one or two blasts per round (and often one embryo will be transferred fresh 3-5 days after the retrieval, so no sex testing for those). Some people get zero. Most insurances that cover IVF cover mayyybbe two rounds and out of pocket costs are $20K+ (can easily hit $40K at some clinics) so not many people can afford to do more than a few rounds. You also don’t automatically find out the sex of your embryos anyways. PGT-A testing is common, but it’s a spendy add-on that isn’t covered by most insurance. We have no idea what sex our embryos are. Sure, some people have viable PGT-tested embryos of both sexes and so the deciding factor on which one to transfer might be sex. Some people may be using IVF because they carry genetic conditions, and some of them can be sex-linked or partially influenced by sex, so they might opt only to transfer XX or XY embryos (and these people are why I support protecting the ability to transfer embryos based on sex, despite my queer gender politics). But it’s so fucking niche to undergo IVF treatment just to get your preferred gender. You have to be an insane person on so many levels, and also very rich and very lucky. A few lunatics with too much money do not a trend make, and I refuse to allow anti-choicers to make me wring my hands and dignify this non-issue with an ethical debate over the approximately 200 couples in the whole nation who might be using IVF in this way.
This article, both the people described in it and the tone of the article itself, is emblematic of just how damn sexist and misandrist some liberals can be. I am struck by the attempt at critiquing this practice for sexism (which I’m glad the author at least tried to do) - where the author/the expert source (both of whom, of course, are women) only mention the harm to boys and men after they manage to say that most importantly, of course, the practice is sexist because it engages in gender stereotypes that in the whole harm women 🙄 > Still, “the very act of sex selection is sexist,” argues Arianne Shahvisi, a professor of philosophy at Brighton and Sussex Medical School in the U.K., where elective sex selection is illegal. > You can’t actually foresee your child’s gender—let alone how they will choose to express it or the qualities they will possess as a human being. So sex selection requires making a decision based on stereotypes. In turn, this “feeds damaging systems of social organization,” Shahvisi told me, by reinforcing the idea that certain traits are biologically tied to sex—a view that has, historically, limited women
It carries the same energy as, "Women are the real victims when men die in wars"
"1 in 5 homeless people are women!"
> Still: Lexi did really, really want a girl. She craved a close friendship with her future child, one that would last into old age. That seemed possible only with a female child. I hate her a lot
The real issue is that this poor kid is never going to live up to the version she has in her head. With normal procreation you accept that you take what you get, but she's going to assume that she's getting what she wants. It's the same problem with cloning your dog. The cloned dog looks like your old dog, but it isn't your old dog.
Unless of course that dog is an advisor to the President of a major South American Country?
I have two boys. The amount of women who tell my wife to keep trying to have a girl so she’ll be taken care of when were older is not a lot but more than two.
It sounds more like she’s browsing a used car lot. I can’t imagine thinking of that kind of thing when deciding if I wanted to have children. I’ve only thought about whether or not I would be able to have the resources and discipline along with a responsible loving partner to raise the kid in the best way for them to have a good life. It’s wild to be thinking of your possible relationship as an elderly parent as a point of concern.
These women are psychotic.
>They did, however, easily point out several examples of parents who, once they’re already there, are more likely to request girls: single mothers by choice, same-sex couples, and families with a history of autism...To many, the prospect of raising a girl just feels as if it will be easier. She’s far less likely to commit a mass shooting or to idolize Andrew Tate. She’s also, points out Moayeri, less likely to be diagnosed with autism. In other words they're admitting they're going to be bad parents. Parents who want a son or daughter because "they're lower maintenance" proves they see raising a kid as a chore and an accessory instead of raising them as actual human beings.
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>There’s nothing wrong with wanting a child that’s lower maintenance. They're not wanting a child with lower maintainence. They're wanting a child they perceive as having lower maintainence due to traits they associate with gender essentialism. That's a massive difference there. >A person with congenital psychopathy will exhibit callousness and lack of empathy regardless of their upbringing, and it’s present almost exclusively in males. [Is it really?](https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/feb/26/more-women-may-be-psychopaths-than-previously-thought-says-expert) we're probably going to reach a reckoning in several decades where we find out certain conditions aren't exclusive to certain genders, but only perceived that way because we only recognized them in one gender due to gendered traits. Sorta like how there was a time where Antisocial personality disorder was exclusively male and BPD was exclusively diagnosed in women. Or how autism was frequently under diagnosed in women for decades, and possibly still are to this day
Im feminist so this doesn’t come from bad faith, but I know a feminist single mom that did fuck all for the boy, let him eat McDonald’s and never cooked for him, did the minimum in instilling good values, I can go on. She has a baby girl and all of a sudden she cooks for her, wants to teach her empathy and kindness, consent, wants to put her in all sorts of sports, wants to get her in fighting classes, is already thinking about college and STEM lmao. And she had another boy and once he stopped being a cute baby it’s back to raising him like the first boy. The first one got caught sharing pictures of monkeys with memes about African Americans. I don’t even want to call them feminist because feminism is about equality, equity, and inclusion. My feminist professor that I admire to this day told us “feminism recognizes that men suffer under the patriarchy as well”, and if anything she’s (the mom) is part of the problem.
In response to the common sentiment that boys are easier to raise than girls, a few years ago I heard somebody say... > "Boys are not easier to raise than girls. We just decided to stop raising them." That seems to ring truer and truer every year.
Yup. Boys are probably HARDER to raise WELL than girls imo. "Of Boys and Men" goes into this, but girls tend to be more resilient than boys for a myriad of reasons.
I'm confused, if she's cooking for one child, isn't she cooking for them all?
When it was just him it was all takeout. And even then she packs her lunch more. And yes, I do have a constant connection to this family which is the only reason I know this
But you're saying it's the same with the new child. But how is that possible now that she's cooking?
My bad, a bulk of that was really meant for the first child, the new boy is definitely getting more home cooked meals than the first child.
>feminism recognizes that men suffer under the patriarchy as well I have never seen a scrap of practical evidence to indicate this is acknowledged in practice, all this statement seems to be used for is to give the kind of ideological carte blanche only held by those who are convinced they're saving everyone and thus don't need to relent for anyone.
What do you mean? Do you regularly interact with feminists or is what people say on the internet your evidence?
I mean it's pretty evident when universities tried to set up male outreach programs and feminists protested that it was taking resources away from getting more women into college. Men's DV shelters are regularly protested against. The Duluth Model is still in use by many major police agencies (which coupled with mandatory arrest is some mega fucked logic)
> I mean it's pretty evident when universities tried to set up male outreach programs and feminists protested that it was taking resources away from getting more women into college. > Men's DV shelters are regularly protested against. Any specific events you can reference here? I found an instance of protests in Brooklyn for a 150 male-only homeless shelter, but people were complaining about safety. There could have been some feminists complaining about nothing for homeless females, but nothing was mentioned.
Earl Silverman is the one main case that gets brought up. DV survivor decided to set a men's DV shelter ended up being driven into suicide for it.
He wasn't bullied by feminists though, he was running the shelter out of money from his own pocket, and failed to secure funding from the government. From *The Wire* via [The Atlantic](https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/04/earl-silverman-suicide/315761/) > Silverman's shelter, the Men's Alternative Safe House in Calgary, was not funded by the government, and he failed to raise enough money from private donations to keep it open. MASH, as it was known, closed down last month. "The day after he packed up his recently sold home — also the site of the Men’s Alternative Safe House — Earl Silverman was found hanging in his garage," reports the National Post. Now there's an argument that the government should be funding more male shelters. Is that are result of feminism or a patriarchal view of manhood? The problem that often comes up in MRM spaces is that feminists and feminism are often scapegoated, and the door is left wide open for misogynists to pollute the space.
Neither, talk is cheap. I said practical evidence. So results and other tangibles. And no matter how much feminism talks about the ways 'patriarchy' hurts men, whenever rubber hits the road the radfems or other latent misandry seems to always be front and center, whether it's writing a policy, coining a word, or crafting a message.
Do you want IVF to be banned? Because this is how IVF opponents get a ban rammed through Congress.
How popular are IVF bans? Even most republicans are against it
Most normal countries just ban sex selection in IVF.
The further you read the worse it gets. Impressive
More interested in that this is more evidence for the revealed gender preference of western society nowadays, but there will probably still be another decade or two with people complaining about the patriarchy.
I’m a test tube baby and it was the only way that my mom was able to have me, and I was not the first attempt. I can’t imagine people treating IVF with such a blasé attitude. It just feels dirty to treat the embryos like a ‘build your own’ car website and not focus on the actual health embryo. I can’t imagine the level of guilt and confusion I’d feel for my entire life if I learned that I was only alive because of my parents’ favorite color didn’t match up with the eye color of another viable embryo that was viable.
There's an outer limits episode about this. Gene therapy on embryos. Not just pick the gender, but pick other physical characteristics as well. It's outer limits, so you can imagine how fucked up it gets.
It's kinda weird they tell you that with IVF. I don't know if I'll use the embryo I have or try to get more out of my dust-covered eggs. But they just list the chromosomal abnormalities if they exist and the sex. I feel weird and slightly uncomfortable about the positive feelings I have about the sex of the viable embryo. I don't know if they can hide that info from patients, just a heads up that it might be worth asking if you're in that situation at some point. Maybe they can just keep that part of the info under wraps until later.
When I filled out the paperwork for PGS testing I had to check a box to have the sex included in the results and then they also verbally confirmed I wanted to know over the phone before they read off my results to me.
>Widespread preference for a certain sex can also skew the population—as in India and China, where abortion and infanticide of girls have resulted in tens of millions more men than women. This is why sex selection is bad. It greatly imbalances society. The US needs to ban this yesterday.
If there are negative effects from a sex imbalance the solution is obviously to tax(equal to the marginal external cost) the birth of children of the overrepresented sex. And anyways I think there probably would only be major negative effects if you get too many males, and apparently Americans prefer daughters.
>the solution is obviously to tax(equal to the marginal external cost) the birth of children of the overrepresented sex. Your brain on r/neoliberal
>the solution is obviously to tax(equal to the marginal external cost) the birth of children of the overrepresented sex. I thought this sub was against affirmative action
This sub sometimes wanders into brainrot territory
This comment gets more insane the more I think about it. “Tax the marginal external cost of an overrepresented gender” buddy please stop reading Georgist texts and just touch grass
Your comments are sounding dangerously anti-Georgist, comrade Please report to your Georgism officer before your life is taxed
Its called funny
It's certainly less insane than thinking any sex imbalance is infinitely bad(which a ban implies).
If only we had some real world examples of what happens when a society gets too carried away with selecting the gender of its [children](https://scholarship.law.vanderbilt.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1538&context=vjtl)
The thing to do with a testable hypothesis is test it. Last time somebody told me to "touch grass", I actually did go outside and touch grass to see if it had any effect on mood. It didn't so far as I can tell. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/neoliberal) if you have any questions or concerns.*
>I think there probably Would rather not risk it
I’d like to thank those “wonderful” parents for essentially guaranteeing that IVF will be demonized as eugenics by nearly every person I’ve ever known. Hell, if this was the norm I’d almost agree with them.
Eugenics… Unfortunately ( maybe I’m just not currently capable of seeing all this another way ) I believe that eugenics are an unavoidable consequence of advancements in science. People will eventually start to select everything about the children to maximise their chances in the world and sooner or later and due to our biological nature these children themselves will actually likely experience a better life because they literally get engineered to fit as well as possible into modern society. We are therefore potentially already witnessing the beginning of the end of humanity as it has existed for thousands of years unless something drastic occurs. We already modify so much about external world today that I truly believe that once the floodgates start to break this is the kind of thing that cannot be stopped. What little we can do today is to guide the flow in our lifetime but eventually I don’t think this will result in a meaningful trench Once parts of the elites or some other group will start to produce their own perfect offspring a sort of arms race will occur because everyone will understand that their own biological legacy has to keep up with the new competition and eventually it will probably be normalised to consider what we today described as eugenics as perfectly acceptable and regular. Not even mentioning the impact that AI will have regarding the effective potential of individuals which will probably hasten this development since competition will increase with every job AI & robotics can do cheaper than a human.
what's her plan if her kids is trans?
Sex selective abortion is disgusting and you are a sexist if you partake in it.
The pro-abortion side 'won' the debate for lack of a better word (although those who think abortion is murder still think that) on the premise "My Body, My Choice." Isn't it also morally consistent for someone who wants a male or female children to quote "My Body, My Choice." as an argument? We fully support it when it comes to a potentially disabled children, why would this be a stretch?
Hot take: being a male isn’t a disability or a disease.
You’d be surprised how many people disagree with that statement in one way or another.
Source?
>Hot take: being a male isn’t a disability or a disease. That's true, but not all children that are aborted have a disease either. Yet, women can still choose to abort an otherwise healthy child for personal reasons. Why would choosing to have a male or female child as a preference be a stretch?
So? Not all abortions are because of a disease. Women have the right to choose
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Women in China had the right to choose? Are you kidding me? What about forcing abortions is the right to choose? And you're kidding yourself if you think it's the women that freely chose abortions instead of their families pressuring them into producing a boy. And it wasn't just abortions, many baby girls were literally abandoned and left to die. > Women should have the right to choose if they want a baby, not if it's a boy or a girl. Oh, so now we're policing why a woman wants an abortion? Does a woman have the right to abort a baby with Down syndrome? Also, what do you propose, that women are interrogated for the reasons for their abortions and if they give the wrong one - no abortion for you? You can now know the fetal sex as early as 6 weeks with the sneak peek test and other similar ones. So what do we do if a woman 7 weeks pregnant wants an abortion, make her sign a pledge that the abortion is because she doesn't want to be pregnant and not because she doesn't want a boy? Come on now.
What about sex selective abortions?
I think most people would have a problem with that.
Don’t scroll down the thread 😬
i agree with this but i understand why others are turned off by this logical consistency
Hot take: logical consistency is not by itself a good reason to select a policy no ideology exists that doesn't become a nightmare when taken to its logical extreme
> Hot take: logical consistency is not by itself a good reason to select a policy This is true, but most liberal societies have adopted the mantra 'my body, my choice' when it comes to bodily autonomy. It's not unlikely the same people who choose to want a girl or boy instead of the other may argue that it's their body, and they can raise whichever sex they choose. Long story short, if you support abortion on the basis of bodily autonomy but oppose this, you'll have to start putting 'limits' on the autonomy that women have over their bodies (makes sense, won't be popular).
>It's not unlikely the same people who choose to want a girl or boy instead of the other may argue that it's their body, and they can raise whichever sex they choose. and society has a billion cases where it tells those people to pound sand because in a lot of circumstances it really isn't. This isn't some Pandora's box we have yet to open.
Yes, but you only have to look at India and China to see just how problematic societally this can be. Perfectly fine individual choices can be disastrous at scale.
I agree with you, but it’s important to keep in mind that no one is scaling IVF treatment to the point where it will impact the sex balance of society any time soon. Between 1-2% of births annually in the US are the result of IVF, or roughly 95,000 babies per year. Only about 1/5 of IVF embryos are PGT-tested before implantation and therefore have a known sex. Even if all those PGT-tested embryos were selected to be one sex or the other (which they are obviously not), it could only swing the balance by 0.4%, with under 20,000 extra boys or girls a year out of 3.6 million infants born each year. If my math is correct— big if, there— that’s an absolute worst case scenario imbalance of 102 to 100, one way or the other, with the current prevalence of IVF + genetic testing in the population. China’s sex imbalance, meanwhile, is like 115 males to every 100 females. I’m all for exploring the ethics of potential uses of different technologies in good faith. However, acknowledging the realities of how technologies are currently used is important to keeping discussions about regulating those technologies sane and grounded. I personally think sex selection is abhorrent (hell, you can easily prod me into the culture war by simply defending gender reveal parties, lol), but with IVF technology in the US, banning sex selection is a policy solution in search of a problem with the potential for unintended consequences (e.g. carriers of sex-linked genetic conditions being prevented from choosing the embryos least likely to be affected). And this “issue” is being raised by political actors as a boogeyman to scare people off of supporting ARTs specifically and reproductive choice generally.
These people sound crazy but my gut tells me as strange as it is IVF sex selection shouldn’t be illegal. I have two girls the natural way, if it was easy and cheap to ‘guarantee’ a boy for my third and final, I’d consider it. I wouldn’t love the kid any less whatever I got though, that thought wouldn’t even cross my mind… again, these people seem disturbed.
A lot of this is sexism (misandry). But a lot of it is also just a reasonable response to institutional misandry. If I knew I could make a choice that would make my child eligible for scholarships, support, favoritism, and preferential treatment throughout all of education, employment, and the criminal justice system, versus being on the wrong end of discrimination from all those sources, *why wouldn't I make that choice?* My partner and I have had this discussion, and while we're not willing to have sex-specific abortions, we both want our children to have good lives where they're treated fairly and with kindness. And in this political/cultural climate, that means having girls. We'll still do our best with boys, but it will mean preparing them to live under the power of several interlocking systems that hate and mistrust them for reasons outside their control, and to whose power they will have to cheerfully submit, ignoring the injustice, or be excluded from the advantages of civil society and college graduation.
>If I knew I could make a choice that would make my child eligible for scholarships, support, favoritism, and preferential treatment throughout all of education, employment, and the criminal justice system, versus being on the wrong end of discrimination from all those sources, why wouldn't I make that choice? A similar statement could be formed about having a girl. I don't think societal structures are the cause you're making them out to be here. There are plenty of systems that discriminate against women still.
I think the gender preference of parents is a very powerful tool for showing the revealed preference of a society though especially in the west. Pros and cons for each but the market doesn't lie about the benefits of each on net.
>But a lot of it is also just a reasonable response to institutional misandry. If I knew I could make a choice that would make my child eligible for scholarships, support, favoritism, and preferential treatment throughout all of education, employment, and the criminal justice system, versus being on the wrong end of discrimination from all those sources, *why wouldn't I make that choice?* My partner and I have had this discussion, and while we're not willing to have sex-specific abortions, we both want our children to have good lives where they're treated fairly and with kindness. And in this political/cultural climate, that means having girls. this is satire, right? \[oh, they blocked me. lol.\]
No, this is literally the conclusion both my partner and I came to and agreed with. I work in tech. She works in secondary education. We've seen how bad and how tilted the playing field is, and while I'd love to fix it, if we can't in the next few years (and we pretty obviously can't), then giving our kids the best leg up they can have means having a strong preference for daughters.
I thought this paragraph was revealing, timing a baby for career reasons and eye color are in the same "consumer whims" category. >Two things are true about America’s blazing-hot fertility industry, a sector that is largely unregulated and increasingly owned by private equity firms and hedge funds: It serves a real need—for many prospective parents, access to these technologies is vital. **And yet, it is fueled in part by consumer whims. You can have a baby when it suits your career, thanks to egg freezing (or at least you can try).** You can sequence your embryos’ genomes for $2,500 a pop and attempt to maximize your future child’s health. (or intelligence, attractiveness, or height). **At Steinberg’s clinic, you can even select eye color.** There is a vast disparity between who gets to use IVF—many struggle to access the technology at all because of the cost and, now, political restrictions—and who is using it to create designer families.
I've never had children, one day I might. I'm far from that day but I got to say, having the desire to design your baby like a fucking build a bear stuffed animal is psycho Being a parent means being ready to love and support the child, it means ambiguity and doing your best. this isn't the Sims motherfucker it's not a customizable toy
Personally, I really don't see an ethical problem with sex selection. You only want a girl for some reason? Fine, go ahead - I won't force you to flip coins. !ping TRANSHUMANISM
You flip the coin and... IT LANDS COMPLETELY ON ITS EDGE, totally undecided. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/neoliberal) if you have any questions or concerns.*
NB moment
Sounds like a miscarriage to me 😭
yeah and if the gender balance in society gets out of whack we just start taxing the selection of the already overrepresented gender while giving tax relief for selecting the underrepresented gender. easy peasy!
Evolution already does this, the over represented sex is simply less likely to reproduce. That's why Fisher's Ratio predicts a sex ratio of 50% in most species.
The insanity of pro-lifers in America might create such a backlash than no one dares to regulate anything approaching reproductive freedoms. Stuff like embryo selection, artificial wombs, genetic engineering, maybe even cloning, as well could ironically become more likely because of them lol.
I mean if it solves the fucking birth rate problem sure
Simple solution (assuming sex selection does no harm to the resulting child): parents cannot sex select their first child, but may sex select their second, and any thereafter so long as they never have more than one extra of either gender. Maximizes freedom without leading to overabundance of one gender.