Platform Video: Now You Can Choose! Issues in Sex Selection

The following ECS/Bergen Platform address was delivered on Sunday, November 15, 2009, by Barbara Katz Rothman (introduced by Janet Glass):

Barbara Katz Rothman: Now You Can Choose! Issues in Sex Selection (11/15/2009) from Ethical Culture Society Bergen on Vimeo.

In the last thirty years we have seen the slow emergence and acceptance of something new under the sun: known fetal sex. Women now know the sex of the fetus they carry; and with selective abortion, selective implantation, or newly developing technologies, they can actually choose the sex of the baby they will bear. How does this change women's experiences of pregnancy? What are the consequences of sex selection for the families involved, and for the rest of the world? Looking beyond the well-known sex imbalances that occur 'out there,' what is happening in American society as fetal sex becomes increasingly one more consumer option?

Barbara Katz Rothman, Professor of Sociology at the City University of New York, is on the Faculty of the Health and Society Program of the Charité -Universitätsmedizin in Berlin, and has served as a Visiting Professor at the Universitat Osnabrueck in Germany, a Fulbright Professor at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, and a Leverhulme Professor at Plymouth University in the United Kingdom. She is the recipient of the Jessie Bernard Award of the American Sociological Associat ion, has been named a “Mother of Bioethics” by the Women’s Bioethics Network, and has received the Mentoring Award from Sociologists for Women in Society and the Lee Founders Award of the Society for the Study of Social Problems. She is editor of BIOETHICAL ISSUES, SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES and THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF CHILDBEARING: CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES. Her books, translated into German, Japanese and Finnish, include IN LABOR, LABORING ON (with Wendy Simonds), THE TENTATIVE PREGNANCY, RECREATING MOTHERHOOD, THE BOOK OF LIFE, and WEAVING A FAMILY.