Promoting Gender Discrimination in the Right to be Born while Claiming to Fight for Equality

This guest post comes from current Regent Law Family Law student, Lauren Moustakas:

While there has been great progress made towards gender equality between men and women in the United States, areas of our society continue to discriminate against women. Some discrimination, like workplace discrimination is more apparent. Others, such as sex selection that often occurs during prenatal and preimplantation genetic testing is less noticed and is not even considered by many to be a form of gender discrimination.

Prenatal genetic testing has become a common and almost automatic procedure that occurs during the course of a pregnancy. It allows a mother or parents-to-be to find out information about their future child before that child is born, such as the likelihood of he or she being born with a developmental disability, and the child’s gender. This information is also acquired by parents who are using Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART) but utilizes preimplantation genetic testing to screen the embryo for genetic disease or gender before it is implanted. While this second form of testing has been a less common procedure due to the cost of ART, it is also used to discriminate against the unborn based on ability and gender. To learn more about these trends see Sex Selection Abortion and the Boomerang Effect of a Woman’s Right to Choose: A Paradox of the Skeptics, 4 Wm & Mary J. Women & L. 91 (1997) and The Challenges of Teaching Gender Equality in a World of Gendercide, 6 Regent J. L. & Pub. Pol’y 1 (2014).

What is particularly alarming about both forms of genetic testing available to prospective parents is that fertility treatment centers in many states, such as California, unashamedly advertise the ability to use this technology to allow parents to select the gender of their child. Even more alarming is the fact that there is no regulation prohibiting selection based on gender in California making the golden state a reproductive tourist destination for potential parents from countries such as China who seek to select a child on the basis of gender. 

This blatant and unabashed gender discrimination not only is having an effect on unborn girls in California and across the United States but is also perpetuating gender discrimination across the globe.

If states like California are serious about addressing gender inequalities in public life, then they need to enact policies that prevents gender discrimination against the unborn. Additionally, potential parents who seek to utilize ART should decide how they will or will not utilize genetic testing in the process of becoming a family before they are faced with the question of whether or not to select their future child on the basis of gender or ability.  

Family restoration requires that building a family never be based on any sort of gender discrimination – not in California, or anywhere else in the world.

Editor's Note: For a helpful perspective of legal jurisprudence on gender equality see also A Christian Perspective on Gender Equality, 15 Duke J. Gender L. & Pol’y 339 (2008).