The technology that ultimately became the dominant method of sex selection around the world began as a tool for navigation. . . . To the 1960s public the technology looked positively futuristic. Around the time pregnancy became a choice rather than an inevitability and the business of having children became about more than generating labor for the farm, we began seeking ways to bond with our babies before birth. An image on which to pin parental hopes made that task a whole lot easier, and so it was a breakthrough to have a preview, however muddled, of the baby growing inside a mother’s uterus. . . .
But public fascination also provided a window for criticism, and ultrasound elicited substantial ethical deliberation. Some critics feared overly powerful scientists. Feminists pushing for abortion rights fretted, justifiably, that the machine humanized the fetus. Others worried the new reproductive technology would be exploited by governments intent on manipulating their populations; the Nazis, after all, had screened newlyweds for genetic diseases in their eugenics program. What if the power to create "superbabies" fell into the hands of an evil dictator? But none of these critiques came close to identifying what turned out to be ultrasound’s most pernicious threat. In hindsight, 1960s Americans worried about everything except the possibility that average parents, emboldened by the new knowledge technology brought them, might make small, seemingly innocuous choices—and that those choices, taken together, would add up to disaster.
Excerpt from Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys over Girls and the Consequences of a World Full of Men by Mara Hvistendahl. Scientific American
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