hieving the desired sex. It is available at thirty-three clinics throughout the United States. The cost is between six hundred and one thousand dollars per treatment (Russell, 1998, p. 112). There are several reasons why parents would want to choose the sex of their child. Perhaps the most important would be for the prevention of passing on sex-liked diseases such as Hemophilia. Since this disease almost always affects boys, it would be in the parents best interest to produce offspring that are female if either parent carries that sex-linked gene. Another reason for sex preselection might be for what is often called family balancing (Schrof, 1998, p. 68). This term refers to wanting girls and boys in the family. For instance, if a couple has two boys and they want the next child to be a girl, a method of gender preselection would help their odds of having a girl. This could help to limit the size of families where the parents may continue having babies until they get the son or daughter that is missing. A third incentive for choosing one of these methods is where there would be a preference of one sex to the other. A good example of this can be seen in China and India, where the desired gender is almost always male. Gender selection in these countries could be a far better alternative to the practices seen there. Routine abortions of female fetuses in India and other parts of Asia are very common as well as dying rooms in China where baby girls are said to be abandoned (Lemonick, 1998, p. 68). These practices will, however, enable people to act upon their biases of one sex or the other. These societies are already out of balance and this could make the problem even worse. Such an outcome as this is highly unlikely in the United States, where surveys show that most families desire an equal number of boys and girls. The same polls indicate that Americans believe the ideal family has a male as the first child. First children...
