The Designer Family: Putting a Dollar Value on a Little Girl
Over at Acculturated this week editor Emily Esfahani Smith highlights a disturbing development, the rise of services that help couples choose the gender of their baby. Couples are paying tens of thousands of dollars to make sure they have girls (the reverse of what we commonly see in China and India), and are heartbroken when they end up with a boy:
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.
Even more disturbing is her reaction when she finally did get her baby girl:
“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.”
Aside from the obvious hints at eugenics that can be seen here, what does this say about how we view children? From the high rates of abortions of babies with Down syndrome or other disabilities to choosing the sex of our babies, are we beginning to view our kids as accessories? As “things” meant to bring us happiness? When parents are paying to make sure the baby they have is the one they want, it really is like buying a new car or renovating a kitchen. It’s a purchase. It puts the child on the same level as the little chihuahua Paris Hilton carried around in her purse: a designer object meant to be used as a status symbol or to make the parent feel good.
And where do we go from here? What if we could choose our children’s eye color, hair color, height? Would we? The reason this is disturbing is because it allows parents to play God… to engineer perfect children, and toss out the not-so-perfect ones. Along the way, would we lose our humanity as well?
Science may allow us to create designer babies, but that doesn’t mean we should.
****
Related at PJ Lifestyle:
“Are more parents seeing their kids like Paris Hilton sees her chihuahua?”
For about thirty years now.
Reminds of the pop song from the 2525. If man is still alive, pick your son, pick your daughter too, from the bottom of a long black tube.
Never imagined the year 2525 would come so soon.
“I lay in bed and cried for weeks,”
What a heartwarming story to tell your son. He would be so proud.
“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.”
What a great sentiment to print in your daughter’s high school yearbook, or maybe on her wedding announcement.
God gifts us with children. Not the other way around. I do applaud her decision to carry her son(s) to term, instead of aborting them until they got the correct gender.
Good comment marco73. It’s right to focus on the effects of a mother’s comments on her child. Once the child learns to read, how will he feel when he learns his mother did not want him? The mother’s comment shows her complete self-absorption. There is something terribly wrong with a society when a mother does not feel ashamed of thinking such a thing and, even worse, does not feel ashamed of uttering such a sentiment out loud.
A small matter of curiosity: is it wrong simply to admit such a thing, or is it actually wrong to FEEL it? If a new parent happens to experience any sort of dismay, is there any acceptable outlet … or is screwing down the pressure-cooker lid the only option?
Are you suggesting that there is a good way to tell your sons “You made me weep bitter tears by your very existence, but your sister is my greatest treasure.?” People like this should have pets, not children.
Probably so. However, accidents happen. And Catholics, to take another example, aren’t really permitted a choice in the matter. Sometimes people who aren’t suited for children find themselves parents in spite of themselves; they then have to make the most of it, while staying sane at the same time.
Besides, there’s a sizable middle ground between a) repressing one’s feelings, words, and actions forevermore, and b) bluntly sharing one’s regrets with the very children in question.
You can expect the children to be praised in different fashion:
Daughter “Mom and Dad, me and Spike got more matching tattoos, and I’m pregnant with another rug rat. Maybe one day we’ll get married and move out of the homeless shelter.”
Mom: “Oh, wonderful darling, we love you so much.”
Son: “Mom and Dad, guess what! A couple other PhD buddies and I figured out a cure for cancer while we were in Base Camp 2 on Everest. We had to say forget the summit, we had to get down the mountain to give the cure to the world. Probably millions will be saved!”
Mom: “You didn’t summit Everest? So what, moron. Shut up, your sister is talking.”
A third option would be to accept that feelings during pregnancy aren’t always sane ones, that feelings themselves are not sins in any case, but that it would be best to recognize that you will grow to love this child and it would damage the child to have your preferences reinforced, or gosh PUBLISHED for all to see! She should have just given him up for adoption, to a family that actually wanted him!
I used to know a guy pretty well (call him George–not his real name). George was a Star Trek fan, and had seen all the shows. He’d grown up while the show was on originally, but had only discovered it when he was in college, living away from home. That was the first time that he was able to tune the TV he watched. When he was little, his parents wanted a girl; when they had him, they tried again, and the girl that they got essentially ruled the household. She got to watch whatever she wanted on TV, and do anything else she wished; George got what was left over, if he was lucky. When I knew him he was in his ’40s, and reasonably well-adjusted, but if you got him onto the subject, he still deeply resented how much favortism his parents lavished on his sister. I never heard him mention either of them in terms of the present, as in meeting them for dinner or visiting.
The old saying is that you don’t get to pick those you fall in love with, or those who are family…only your friends. What happens when we change that?
Bleh, at least the similar question that arises in shotgun marriages can be answered, “Because we love you very much, and despite the fact that it wasn’t what we wanted, it was more important for us to make sure you would be okay than for us to do what we wanted.”
http://anthrodreams.libsyn.com/ad-020-goodnight-ari