Choosing Your Baby's Gender: TMJ4 Report

On TMJ4's 10:00 PM "news" last night, Courtny Gerrish did a report on choosing a baby's gender.

It begins:

Advances in medicine are allowing more parents to choose their baby's gender. Is it a medical marvel or interfering with fate?

"Advances in medicine"?

I don't see the destruction of innocent human life as a "medical advance" in any way.

"Interfering with fate"?

That's an odd way to describe the sanctity of life.

Larry and DeDe Leber of Tucson, a couple with four sons and six grandsons, were highlighted in the report.

COURTNY GERRISH: Mom and Dad never expected to end up with four boys.

DEDE LEBER: We had the one boy. We had Mark. And then I was really disappointed with Eric. I mean, I had a boy. I was supposed to have the girl. The other ones, I just laughed.

GERRISH: Mark, Eric, Scott, and Todd. But it didn't end there. The Lebers have six grandsons, and another on the way. Back in the day, there were no ultrasounds, and definitely no way to choose a boy or girl.

LARRY LEBER: You took what you got.

GERRISH: Times have changed.

I was taken aback by the tone of the report.

The only way an ultrasound could be a factor in choosing the sex of a baby is by aborting, killing, a baby of the unwanted sex.

Yeah, "back in the day," one couldn't get rid of the baby of the "wrong" sex. One didn't know the sex of the baby one was carrying.

"Definitely no way to choose a boy or girl"?

That's so matter-of-fact. Choosing a boy or girl involves killing human life.

Aborting the baby of the "wrong" sex wasn't an option "back in the day."

Yes, times have changed.

And of course, the science wasn't available to create as many as 20 embryos for implantation to choose a baby of the "right" sex.

Here's the video of the report:



The report does briefly mention the ethical issue of gender selection.

However, the morality of utilizing the "advances in medicine," such as simply discarding "extra" embryos, destroying human life in the process of getting a child of the "right" sex, is not given appropriate consideration in the story.

What the report fails to do is make clear that killing innocent human life is what's happening here in order to choose the sex of a baby. Embryos of the "wrong" sex aren't implanted. A baby already developing in the womb, determined via an ultrasound to be the "unwanted" sex, can be aborted in the name of "family balancing."

This is ghoulish stuff, sanitized as "Advances in medicine allowing more parents to choose their baby's gender."

Let's be honest. This is not a feel-good report. What it really explains is that more parents are able to kill their babies on demand, if they're the gender they don't want.

This isn't an advance. Gender selection, by definition, involves the deaths of innocents.