Should human beings have sex? Sexual dimorphism and human enhancement.
Since the first sex reassignment operations were performed, individual sex has come to be, to some extent at least, a technological artifact. The existence of sperm sorting technology, and of prenatal determination of fetal sex via ultrasound along with the option of termination, means that we now have the power to choose the sex of our children. An influential contemporary line of thought about medical ethics suggests that we should use technology to serve the welfare of individuals and to remove limitations on the opportunities available to them. I argue that, if these are our goals, we may do well to move towards a "post sex" humanity. Until we have the technology to produce genuine hermaphrodites, the most efficient way to do this is to use sex selection technology to ensure that only girl children are born. There are significant restrictions on the opportunities available to men, around gestation, childbirth, and breast-feeding, which will be extremely difficult to overcome via social or technological mechanisms for the foreseeable future. Women also have longer life expectancies than men. Girl babies therefore have a significantly more "open" future than boy babies. Resisting the conclusion that we should ensure that all children are born the same sex will require insisting that sexual difference is natural to human beings and that we should not use technology to reshape humanity beyond certain natural limits. The real concern of my paper, then, is the moral significance of the idea of a normal human body in modern medicine.
Sparrow
Robert
R
Centre for Human Bioethics, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria 3800, Australia. robert.sparrow@arts.monash.edu.au
D026686:Beneficence; D024803:Biomedical Enhancement / Q000941:ethics*; D002755:Choice Behavior / Q000941:ethics*; D012734:Disorders of Sex Development; D026689:Ethical Analysis; D028663:Ethical Theory; D005260:Female; D005783:Gender Identity; D018594:Human Body; D006801:Humans; D008017:Life Expectancy; D008297:Male; D028681:Moral Obligations; D010290:Parents; D036801:Parturition; D011640:Public Policy; D012098:Reproduction; D012723:Sex; D012727:Sex Characteristics; D012743:Sex Preselection / Q000941:ethics*; D019529:Sexuality