DANIEL SCHIFF
From our contemporary vantage-point, of course, it has become obvious that God does not seem to have any reservations about building technology per se- only about building towers of vanity that attempt to scrape at the door of heaven. Maybe there is an object lesson here about sex preselection: that while there is no harm in creating structures that place a heightened capability in our hands, towers of total dominance that serve no other purpose than the demonstration of our aspiration for control do not leave much room for God . As one commentator observed about the illfated Babel venture,"[a]ll human effort is both futile and empty, if dictated by self-exaltation, and divorced from acknowledgement of God ."* The Jewish ideal of human accomplishment is clearly to be found in advances that truly enrich the quality of the human condition while yet exalting God . Perhaps it is this illuminating notion that should be our guiding light as we try to evaluate the variety of sex preselection opportunities that will become increasingly available as the future unfolds.
Notes
1. The term"sex preselection" is the most precise for current purposes. As the 1977 report, "Assessing Biomedical Technologies" prepared for the National Science Foundation explains,"Sex' in this context signifies gender in the purely genetic sense, as determined at the time of conception. Physiological and psychological definitions of gender- influenced by various hormonal and environmental factors, as well as by the genetic sex- are not meant to be represented by the term."
"Preselection" refers to predetermining sex by interventions prior to conception, as opposed to"selection" which refers to interventions after conception.
2. Owen D. Jones,"Sex Selection: Regulating Technology Enabling the Predetermination of a Child's Gender," in Harvard Journal of Law and Technology, Fall 1992, Vol. 6, p. 4.
3. Ibid. p. 5. 4. Ibid., p. 6.