JDG wrote:
Massive straw man, unworthy of reply. See Charlie's posts on the
subject.
I don't think that calling my argument a straw man contributes to
positive debate on this subject.
OK, I'm sorry. Your argument is fallacious because the chance that the
male/female ratio becomes severely offset under current circumstances is
very close to zero.
I believe that Charlie's point is that such a situation would be
unstable in the long run. If a generation of people comes out
disproportionately female, then this would create an incentive to
produce male children. This perhaps may be true - but doesn't do
any good for the people who were born in the disproportionate
generation.
Secondly, the point doesn't consider the possibility of misaligned
incentives. There may be many reason why parents perceive children
of one sex to be more desireable than those of another - and those
reasons might have nothing to do with adulthood. For instance,
parents may perceive that they will enjoy playing games with a
female child more than a male child, or that a female child is
easier to manage while growing up than a male child, etc. These
sorts of cultural perceptions could easily result in misaligned sex
ratios persisting into the long term.
But what indication do you have that any of this would ever happen? You
can't make laws based on imaginary scenarios; _nothing_ would be legal!
Leaving aside the number of people doing this because of a birth
defect, you do realize that you are essentially arguing that this
practice is o.k., so long as only rich people do it? The expense
of the procedure shouldn't affect the morality of this procedure.
If the procedure is moral and sensible for a few rich people to
engage in, then it should be moral and sensible for everyone to
engage in - should they have the opportunity.
No, I'm arguing that I don't believe that the practice (choosing sex) will
become widespread. If it _does_ begin to become widespread, then we can
worry about banning the procedure. It has nothing to do with ethics.
Yes we are. We are talking about conceiving a number of children,
and "eliminating" the children of the undesired sex.
Abortion is the termination of a pregnancy. I mean really, are you going
to ban sunglasses next because they might block the twinkle in Daddy's eye?
I can only hope that you get the opportunity to join me in
supporting a ban on sex-selection abortions.
I promise you that if sex selection via termination of pregnancy becomes a
problem in the U.S., I'll write my congressperson.
Let me ask you again. Do you think we should tailor our laws to
remedy the shortcomings of the Chinese social system?
I still have no idea what you mean by this. I merely think that if
the Chinese Communists think that a certain procedure is too
gruesome to allow in their own country, that should be a strong
tipoff that we shouldn't be allowing it in our own country either.
It doesn't have anything at all to do with gruesomeness. When I suggested
that there were no good reasons for banning the procedure you stated
"isn't the real danger of ending up with an unbalanced population, making
it difficult for a generation to find a mate, worth noting?" but in fact,
that is not a problem in the U.S. It is a problem in China (and a few
other nations). Lacking a problem here, the only reason to ban the
procedure would be to accommodate the problems in other nations,
especially China.
If you had good reason to anticipate a problem here, perhaps a ban would
be justified, but I haven't seen any evidence to suggest that you do; just
speculation.
--
Doug
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