Money Can Buy You a Baby Girl. But What About Happiness?

Desperate for a baby girl, Simpson and her husband drove four hours to a fertility clinic in Michigan. Gender selection is illegal in Canada, which is why the couple turned to the United States. They paid $800 for a procedure that sorts sperm based on the assumption that sperm carrying a Y chromosome swim faster in a protein solution than sperm with an X chromosome do.

Simpson and her husband talked about getting an abortion, but she decided to continue with the pregnancy. In the meantime, she looked for a way to absolutely guarantee that her next child would be the daughter she had always dreamed about. She discovered an online community of women just like her, confiding deep-seated feelings of depression over giving birth to boys. The Web forums mentioned a technique offered in the United States that would guarantee her next baby would be a girl. It would cost tens of thousands of dollars, money Simpson and her husband did not have. Simpson waited until her third son was born. Then she began to make some phone calls.

This article is full of interesting moral questions. Here’s one critic, for instance:

We know about the consequences of China’s “unnatural selection.” What will be the consequences of our own? Is this Western version of sex selection at all similar to the sex selection that goes on in places like China? In China and India, parents screen their fetuses so that they can abort them if they are girls. Simpson, upon finding out that she was pregnant with a son, contemplated getting an abortion.

I’m not interested in debating pro-life versus pro-choice issues here, but I do think that this article reveals an interesting fact about a culture like ours that is saturated with choices: That when we have the ability to choose nearly anything we want, we will never be satisfied until we have exactly what we think we want. Along these lines, I recommend psychologist Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less: How the Culture of Abundance Robs us of Satisfaction. The theme of the book is that sometimes, it’s better to not have the choices than to have them.

I wonder if that wisdom would apply to Simpson’s situation.

There’s another problem with being so choosey. It can degrade the things we value. For instance, the title of the Slate article is “How to Buy a Girl.” To that end, the part of the article that disturbed me the most was a quote from Simpson, who eventually did end up having a girl with the help of her fertility doctors. Here is what she said about her daughter: “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.”