The Future of Unnatural Family Planning

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A  prominent British fertility doctor says he has a way  to  reduce female infanticide and late-term abortions in the developing world: let parents choose gender. Where Indian and Chinese parents prefer boys, they'd be free to have them. As the number of girls decreases, their status would likely rise.

It's not a particularly realistic scenario, given that infanticide is driven in part by extreme poverty. People who find infant girls too economically burdensome to raise are highly unlikely to find themselves mulling expensive IVF treatments. But sex selection is getting cheaper and more common, and the technology is bound to collide with cultural assumptions and gender status in all sorts of unpredictable, and potentially positive, ways. And that's just one of many reasons to cheer on the coming of our designer baby overlords.