That parents should be allowed to choose the biological sex of their children.

ThesisThe legalization and implementation of sex selection into hospitals would be a bad decision and would prove to be harmful to society in the future. Evidence:Statistics have shown that the majority of people would prefer to have a boy as opposed to a girl. In the USA one poll showed that 40% of the American people would prefer to have a boy while only 22% would like to have a girl (statistics do not add up due to a portion of people who were undecided) [1]. In Third World countries this percentage would be even higher in the favor of having a male child due to the following reasons:a) Sons would be able to provide greater economic support in the future.b) Sons are more able to help with physical work in the future than girls are. c) Many cultures prefer to have a son as opposed to a daughter. For point a, this is evidenced by the fact that women are still only making 77 cents compared to every dollar that a man earns [2]. If a family/couple is poor, they would prefer to have a son because it is more likely that he will be able to provide for them in the future. Point b is fairly obvious, as it is has been shown that women only have 52% the amount of upper body strength than men do [3]. Also, most cultures would never even consider having a girl do heavy work around the house anyways. Point c is also obvious, as many cultures in Asia (China, India, South East Asia) show that they prefer to have sons over daughters. While all these statistics are interesting, what do they have in relation to sex selection? For my argument at least, they mean everything. Based on the statistics above, if a couple was given the opportunity to choose the gender of their future child they would most likely select male. This is fine as long as only a few couples are doing this sex selection, however if every/most couples are choosing the gender of their child then this poses a huge problem. This problem is that if more and more boys are being born as opposed to girls, in about two decades when it is their turn to reproduce, their simply won't be enough women to match with men to produce the future generation. This means that populations will drop dramatically, and as Russia has shown us, this is a very bad thing [4]. Sex selection would have the most harmful impact on China, however. in China, the government has implemented the infamous one-child policy. Since the Chinese people have always preferred boys to girls, the disparity in boys and girls being born would be enormous due to the fact that the people only have one opportunity to have a child. Currently, this is already a problem in China as 117 boys are being born compared to every 100 girls [5]. This number would be greatly exaggerated given the implantation of sex selection given that the couples would no longer have to go to immoral lengths (abortion, neglection, or even murder) to no longer have a female child. China, however, is not the only culture that prefers boys over girls, as Graph A displays the current gender disparity in several countries. Graph A:Given this large gender disparity that would most certainly be exaggerated given the implementation of sex selection, what would the results be in these countries. For one, populations would dramatically drop as mentioned earlier. This would destroy the economies of countries, especially in China and India due to the fact that they would not have enough workers to support their massive industries. Another theoretical result would be an increased crime (especially sex-related crimes) due to the fact that there are a larger number of angered, single men. This has already proved to be an issue in China as there as been an increased crime rate ever since the implementation of the one-child policy [6].Conclusion: Legalizing sex selection would be a terrible idea due to the fact that many more males will be born as opposed to females. I have shown that an increased gender disparity between males and females would bring bad results because it would harm the population, economy, and would increase crime rates within the country in question.Sources: [1] http://www.care2.com...[2] http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com...[3] http://health.howstuffworks.com...[4] http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org...[5] http://www.economist.com...[6] http://www.economist.com...