--- In [EMAIL PROTECTED], "Dan Minette" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Well, if you are able to assume that the economic cost of choosing > a baby's sex goes down, I thought I could assume that the price of > oil would not go up...
For the recrord, I don't see how anything I said implied that the price of oil would go up.... > The problem I was thinking about was the fact that CO2 levels in > the atmosphere would really go through the roof. But this has nothing to do with the use of private jets, and everything to do with a pollution externality. Assuming that there was a suitable carbon tax in place to account for the externality, I can't think of anything inherently immoral about everyone owning private jets. > Let's assume that, in the future, there would be an easy, cheap > method of > picking the sex of a child, pre-conception. Let's also assume > that it rarely was used to get all boys or all girls, that most > families who used it > picked a girl if they had a boy and a boy if they had a girl. Why > would this be such a significant problem that the government had > to ban it? I don't know that this is a valid assumption. For example, in the United States, parents whose first-born child is a girl are quite a bit more likely (sorry I don't have the exact number handy) to have a second child than parents whose first-born child is a boy. A couple with three girls is still 4 percent more likely to try for a 4th child than a couple with three boys. This suggests that in a first iteration of a cheap and easy gender- choosing scenario in the US, that we would end up with more boys than girls. Leaving that aside, as I mentioned earlier, I am unconformtable with the idea that parents have the right to unilaterally alter another human being's (i.e. their child's) genetic code in arbitrary ways without the child's permission. JDG _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
