Genetic Dilemmas Dena Davis Summary

Dena Davis in the 5th chapter of “Genetic Dilemmas: Reproductive Technology, Parental Choices, and Children’s Futures” explores the global attitudes, policies, and morality towards determination of sex. She begins with presenting empirical evidence of some preferences held in countries such as India or China where there is a clear desire for male children. This inclination is so deeply held that mothers can be socially and physically harmed when, by pure biological chance, they fail to produce a male child. Davis and others allow sex selection in these cases, purely in the interest of harm reduction of mothers and their daughters born into such a situation. This example is contrasted with so-called “western” societies, where the preference

This is meant to alleviate logistical concerns that sex selection will lead to disastrous gender skewing. However, Davis takes this evidence and evaluates it with a moralistic concern about the motivations and expectations that arise from the ideal 50/50, “family-balancing” scenario that an aforementioned large percentage of Americans say they would employ given the option. It seems to Davis that this desire for a balanced family is sexist to its core, in that it completely ignores all potential traits that two children may exhibit in favor of equally distributing sex at birth between them. This is to say that the act of family balancing only seems to be accepted on the basis of gender, not other attributes or hobbies that a child may have. Parents wouldn’t be so keen to prohibit a younger child from pursuing chess club as an extracurricular just because their eldest had already been a member in grade school, even though this would cause an imbalance in the perceived qualities of their

Wong depicts her personal philosophy as a woman who, as she nears the time of planning her own family, she must consider all of the possibilities if she accepts genetic testing. She specifically focuses on the repercussions of a potential Trisomy-21 diagnosis for her child, and what it would mean philosophically to abort that fetus and how it would be similar for a parent to select against having a daughter. She recognizes a very important connotation here, something that was implicit in Davis’s argument against sex selection; there is a clear distinction between the genetics of being female and how being female is treated in society. Based on her experiences with a brother who has Down’s, she firmly establishes that there is a distinction between having three copies of the 21st human chromosome and the treatment and expectations of Down’s Syndrome within modern society. Wong clearly shows that there exist expectations of both “diagnoses” that severely constrain the options of those who receive them; Gender expectations arise from centuries of role solidification while the expectations of Down’s Syndrome come from, as Wong describes, a lack of experience with Down’s