The causes and effects of gender selection

 Non – medical reasons:

According to the Genomic resource centre of WHO, family balancing reasons are one of the core motivations for engaging in gender selection. The non – medical reasons include family balancing purposes, culture or finance. Many couples want to choose the sex of a child because they already have one or more children of the other sex. This creates a gender balance in the family. Furthermore, culture is also a factor that many couples want to choose the sex of the child. In some cultures like Vietnam, China, … the sons is compulsory. Because the psychology that are respected men than women, sons continue the family lines, … has been defined in the culture of these countries since feudal times. In addition, finance is one of the reasons that many couples choose baby’s gender. Many people think that their son can shoulder all the responsibilities and adopt them as they are older. They are non – medical reasons make the gender selection become more popular nowadays, leading to effects will be presented below. About the legislation, the gender selection for non – medical reasons is unacceptable in the laws of 36 countries, including 25 European countries (Darnovsky, 2009).

2.2. The effects of gender selection

In fact, gender selection has both the pros and cons:

 The benefits are to reduce the generation of children suffering from incurable diseases, further improving the relationship between parents and child (Dondrop et al., 2013), or simply help couples reduce stress since they already know the sex of the fetus.

 However, gender selection causes much harm to the family and society.

• For families:

Family happiness will not be complete if there are men aged adults who find it harder to get marriage with the wives they want. This causes anxiety and stress, taking more time to find a wife, and affecting the happiness and sustainable development of home economics for family members.

The wives try to bear the son because of being forced from the family and the husband, or abort due to fetal gender selection, which adversely affect women’s health and sustainable development of family economy. In addition, each birth can cause unpredictable risks for the health of both mother and child. And abortion will cause worry, fear for the woman; complications such as cervical injury, infection,… and can lead to infertility.

• For society:

Gender imbalance at birth would pose new challenges for population work as it will require more resources for research to grasp the status of the sex ratio at birth, which increase highly in the province/city, county/ district,…; cause of this situation for recommending intervention measures. The problem solving gender imbalance at birth requires Population and family planning programs take a long time, dramatically increase resources to tackle this problem.

According to EMBO reports (2012), due to using gender selection technology earlier than other countries do in Asia, South Korea has very high the sex ratio at birth (SRB), at 125 in 1992. Followed by China’s SRB, the ratio stood at 118 in 2010 (Chan et al., 2002). India is also a country with a remarkable rate, SRB was 109 at the same year with China (George, 2006). This greatly affects the rights of women, they just have a low status in the society.