right to live

Children are gifts from God for parents. They bring happiness, laughter and future for mothers and fathers that make human’s life more meaningful. There is not any difference between boy and girl babies because both of them are all invaluable gifts and indispensable to the human existence. However, people are recently thinking about choosing gender for new-born baby to have desired babies that goes against nature. I strongly disagree with this thought for two reasons. To begin with, choosing gender for new-born baby encourages sex discrimination that clearly targets women. Sadly, this trend has spread widely in every country and region. For example, the great improvement in China, especially in second half of this century, cannot deracinate totally discrimination against women that has existed for a long time (Purewal, 2010). It is clear that if sex selection becomes legal, discrimination against women will flourish unexpectedly all over the world because parents are more likely to choose a new-born boy instead of a new-born girl. The reason is that “a resilient and cultural hegemony” requires having sons for conserving asset, descent and prolonging male-headed of the family (Purewal, 2010) which is obviously old-fashioned and distorted. We have fought for equality between men and women for decades and now we allow choosing gender for new-born baby that means trying our best into nothing. Because boys are often preferred, the number of girl decreases dramatically. “girls are killed, aborted and abandoned” in some countries in the world, typically in China and India. According to The United Nations, 200 millions girls are missing today in the world due to sex discrimination (Nasreen, 2012). Moreover, sex discrimination also makes women suffer violations of women’s rights. They have to bear the discrimination, neglect and even violence. They are blamed and penalized for not giving birth to sons and going for abortion. It is clear that women receive both psychological and physical damages from sex discrimination. For example, in India, young women are threatened to be punished such as beaten or divorced for not giving birth to sons (Bumgarner, 2007). Choosing gender for new-born baby leads to expansion of sex discrimination that harms women and girl babies. The world is fighting for gender equality but sex selection goes against this efforts. Another reason is that choosing baby’s gender greatly contributes to increasing sex imbalance on worldwide scale. “Sex imbalance” is not a new problem, on the other hand, it’s becoming more and more serious in almost all countries. In fact, sex ratios at birth (male to female) in some countries are so high such as in China is 1.13, in Brazil is 1.05 (The World factbook). All of that numbers are the solid evidences for the current fact of gender imbalance. This situation has had negative consequences on multifaceted life, typically on society and economy. Firstly, it’s easy to notice the significant bad effects of sex imbalance on our society. Due to son preference of almost parents, there was a terrible number of involuntarily unmarried man; the number of exceeded man under 20 years of age is estimated around 32 million in China in 2005 (Hesketh, 2009).When the phenomenon “Missing women” was more serious in some countries like China or Korea, it incidentally created the opportunity for booming of women trafficking across border. According to a report of CEOP in 2011, thousands of Vietnamese women and children were trafficked to different countries for the purpose of squeezable marriage or to be “ sexually exploited in brothels” during four years (2005-2009). Therefore, to prevent this kind of dangerous crime, we need to have discernment about the deep cause – prenatal sex selection. Secondly, male-female imbalance stimulated considerable consequences in economic performance. It triggers an underground competition among men in order to improve their positions in the marriage market and “wealth is a crucial status variable” (S.Chang & X.Zhang, 2012). Unfortunately, excess of male laborers would intensify the competition in the job market and make it even more difficult for women to find jobs. Moreover, in some sectors, men had better take positions which formerly belonged to women, while in some others sectors, men had to face with more severe competition because of the shortage of female. Opponents of this opinion claimed that choosing gender for new-born baby helps parents have desired babies in order that they will love and take care of their babies better. However, parents only concern about their preference without caring about children’s right. Millions girl babies have no chance of life and this figure will increase significantly if sex selection is allowed. If parents have rights to choose their baby’s gender, why don’t children have the rights to live? Indeed, “Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth therein, without distinction of any kind, such as race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status”(Rights of the child,1989,p.42). Attempting to choose your baby's gender cannot be seen as anything less than selfish and controlling. Currently, its consequences haven’t been seen obviously but in the future it will create big problem to human’s community like increasing sex inequality and gender imbalance. “Nature knows how to maintain the ratio of the sexes. Before this kind of ideas start from the human mind, Nature is maintaining the ratio properly.” (Nick, 2001).