at Slate:
Megan Simpson always expected that she would be a mother to a daughter.
She had grown up in a family of four sisters. She liked sewing, baking, and doing hair and makeup. She hoped one day to share these interests with a little girl whom she could dress in pink.
Simpson, a labor and delivery nurse at a hospital north of Toronto, was surprised when her first child, born in 2002, was a boy. That’s okay, she thought. The next one will be a girl.
Except it wasn’t. Two years later, she gave birth to another boy.
Desperate for a baby girl, Simpson and her husband drove four hours to a fertility clinic in Michigan. Gender selection is illegal in Canada, which is why the couple turned to the United States. They paid $800 for a procedure that sorts sperm based on the assumption that sperm carrying a Y chromosome swim faster in a protein solution than sperm with an X chromosome do.
Simpson was inseminated with the slower sperm that same day. Fifteen weeks later, she asked a colleague at the hospital to sneak in an after-hours ultrasound. The results felt like a brick landing on her stomach: another boy.
“I lay in bed and cried for weeks,” said Simpson, now 36, whose name has been changed to protect her privacy. She took a job in the operating room so she would no longer have to work with women who were giving birth to girls.
Simpson and her husband talked about getting an abortion, but she decided to continue with the pregnancy. In the meantime, she looked for a way to absolutely guarantee that her next child would be the daughter she had always dreamed about. She discovered an online community of women just like her, confiding deep-seated feelings of depression over giving birth to boys. The Web forums mentioned a technique offered in the United States that would guarantee her next baby would be a girl. It would cost tens of thousands of dollars, money Simpson and her husband did not have. Simpson waited until her third son was born. Then she began to make some phone calls.
The conventional wisdom has always been this: Given a choice, couples would prefer sons. That has certainly been the case in places like China and India, where couples have used pregnancy screening to abort female fetuses. But in the United States, a different kind of sex selection is taking place: Mothers like Simpson are using expensive reproductive procedures so they can select girls.
Just over a decade ago, some doctors saw the potential profits that could be made from women like Simpson—an untapped market of young, fertile mothers. These doctors trolled online forums, offering counseling and services. They coined the phrase “family balancing” to make sex selection more palatable. They marketed their clinics by giving away free promotional DVDs and setting up slick websites.
These fertility doctors have turned a procedure originally designed to prevent genetic diseases into a luxury purchase akin to plastic surgery. Gender selection now rakes in revenues of at least $100 million every year. The average cost of a gender selection procedure at high-profile clinics is about $18,000, and an estimated 4,000 to 6,000 procedures are performed every year. Fertility doctors foresee an explosion in sex-selection procedures on the horizon, as couples become accustomed to the idea that they can pay to beget children of the gender they prefer. …
“It’s high-tech eugenics,” said Marcy Darnovsky, director of the Center for Genetics and Society, a Berkeley, Calif. nonprofit focused on reproductive technologies. “If you’re going through the trouble and expense to select a child of a certain sex, you’re encouraging gender stereotypes that are damaging to women and girls. …What if you get a girl who wants to play basketball? You can’t send her back.”
September 15th, 2012 | 8:14 am
The most telling quote: “My husband and I stared at our daughter for that first year. She was worth every cent. Better than a new car, or a kitchen reno.”
Ugh.
September 15th, 2012 | 11:58 am
I’m not a doctor, but this story sounds like it is describing some kind of mental illness. Lying in bed crying for weeks over the fact that your baby is a boy does not sound like a healthy balanced person’s reaction. Instead of accommodating this mental illness by catering to it, perhaps one could be helped by a psychiatrist.
September 15th, 2012 | 1:01 pm
Frankly, this woman and her husband should be ashamed. As I said in the Slate comment thread, consumerism will definitely be the end of us if people, especially children, become commodities that are bought and sold for our own gratification.
September 15th, 2012 | 2:46 pm
How absolutely revolting.
September 16th, 2012 | 11:40 am
I pity that child if (or when) she does not match her mother’s expectations. She is competing with some fantasy daughter. In the long run, the boys might be better off by not being the focus of their mother’s dreams.
I agree that mental illness seems likely. It is a pity that her husband went along with it.
September 16th, 2012 | 4:58 pm
What about the option of adopting a girl? Was that even considered?
September 17th, 2012 | 10:53 am
No matter the reason, there are lot of mentally ill patients that walk into fertility clinics. Med students going into psychiatry would benefit from doing a rotation at a fertility clinic, there’s tons of disordered rich people.
September 17th, 2012 | 11:16 am
Depression over having a boy doesn’t seem like the abominable parental failure that some people consider it. I imagine that throughout history, a lot of parents have been surprised–pleasantly or unpleasantly–by something about their child, and handle it with greater & lesser degrees of equanimity.
If I understand correctly, the Catholic Church has always enjoined married couples to have children–regardless of their feelings about children in general, and regardless of what they would like in a child. At first blush, requiring them to consistently fake or manufacture happiness over the results, and to mask any disappointments or regrets, seems like adding insult on top of (what, from a non-Catholic perspective, can sometimes look like) injury.
September 17th, 2012 | 7:23 pm
@SLHersey,
I haven’t checked but I don’t think I find the catechism tells parents to fake emotions. It would tell them to LOVE a child, a decision not necessarily based on emotions. Loving means accepting a person with all their handicap, disappointments, imperfections, gender. Loving means you know you will disappointed in others and have regrets. If a parent regrets their child or chooses favorites, even if unspoken, the child will know. This adds a lifetime of psychological injury to the child, and yes, it has happened before the IVF era. IVF will only make it more acceptable, and increase the neurosis among rich people.
September 18th, 2012 | 10:49 am
There is also a difference between a mild, normal regret that you didn’t get the sex of child you were hoping for, and getting beyond it an loving the child you have, and this kind of entitlement attitude that makes a virtue out of dwelling on your disappointment, and out of finding unnatural and costly means to “make it right.” One is the way an adult deals with disappointment, and the other is the approach toward life of a three-year-old with precocious resources.
September 18th, 2012 | 10:51 am
That makes sense, TXW. However, it does sound as if “fake emotions” are considered advisable, in order to stave off psychological injury to the child. I’m not saying there are better alternatives, only that people who aren’t naturally affectionate towards children–or towards the children they ended up with–must have to engage in a remarkable tour de force of bottling-up. I’m a little unsettled by commenters who seem to feel that some initial cracks in their masks are “revolting” or a sign of mental imbalance.
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