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Gender is not a disease," a Northwestern University fertility specialist recently told The Washington Post. "My job is to help people make healthy babies, not help people design their babies."

And yet, when affluent couples select the sex of their babies by using preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) in connection with in vitro fertilization, they are in danger of treating gender like a disease.

PGD was developed to detect genetically transmitted diseases such as hemophilia and Tay-Sachs disease and to allow couples to destroy those "defective" embryos. Pro-life Christians shudder at the deliberate destruction of any embryo, but applying this search-and-destroy technique to sex selection adds a new and frightening dimension to reproductive technology: We are now seeing the intersection of old-fashioned eugenic ideology with the very American ethic of choice.

In the early decades of the 20th century, the eugenics movement flourished as high-minded moral reformers (including many evangelical Christians) sought to perfect society by purging it of "undesirables." People with disabilities or destructive habits were discouraged or banned from reproducing. One prominent evangelical crusader spoke of "the great and rapidly increasing army of idiots, insane, imbeciles, blind, deaf-mutes, epileptics, paralytics, the murderers, thieves, drunkards, and moral perverts" and called them "very poor material with which to subdue the world," and usher in the glad day when "all shall know the Lord." She suggested that there were "hundreds and thousands of men and women … to whom in the interests of future generations, some rigid law should say, 'Write this one childless.'"

The eugenics movement finally lost its last shred of credibility as the horrors of Nazi attempts to exterminate the "defectives" became known. Since then, Christians have learned to love those with physical or mental limitations—and not only to love them, but to see them as God's gifts.

Our desire for choice has become insatiable. "These are grown-up people expressing their reproductive choices," the director of a fertility institute told The Washington Post. "We cherish that in the United States."

Too true. Choice is now the market analog of political liberty. Transpose the political notions of liberty into a commercial framework and you get choice, with the maximization of choice as a supreme value. Transpose choice again, into the moral sphere, and you get not liberty but anarchy.

The culture of choice uses any available technology to further the range of choice—the one value of American society that we seem loathe to question. From the time of Archimedes, technology has, of course, been about conquering human limitations. There is nothing new about the desire to influence the sex of our children, and to do so people have used everything from folk remedies to abortion and infanticide. But what limits are we trying to overcome? Are we trying to conquer chance—to beat the odds in the gender lottery? Or is it providence we want to control?

If you see gender as providential, as a gift from God, then whichever sex you are, whichever sex your child is, you are blessed. Maleness and femaleness are alike "very good." And like all good gifts, the gift of sexuality reveals something about the Giver. And like all good givers, his gifts are personal, and the proper response is gratitude.

On Christmas morning, one does not reject a gift and demand to have what some other family member has received. Human sexuality is a gift to be received, not an attribute to be engineered.

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February 2005, Vol. 49, No. 2