Prejudice Against "Unbalanced" Families

Admirably, John Robertson respects the range and depth of peoples' desires for children. He never regards parents as consumers, preference maximizers, or narcissistic people in quest of "perfect" or "designer" children or immortality. Nor, I think, do his policy suggestions or his procreative liberty rationales lend themselves to such dismissive uses or critiques of parental desires. They do, however, have consequences that should worry a champion of individual autonomy. To limit PSS to "gender-balancing" couples excludes people who want only one child of a specific sex, or a second child of the same sex as their first child. Among such people might well be a disproportionately large number of single people and same-sex couples—the very people already disadvantaged by Robertson's tendency to identify parenthood and family formation with biological procreation. Needing gametes from others, these "socially infertile" people are exposed on Robertson's analysis to the parental claims of reproductive assistants—a clear limitation of their procreative liberty or autonomy. In short, Robertson's proposals and underlying analyses have heterosexist constraints he should wish to avoid.

Heterosexists believe that males and females differ in ways that complement each other and so make their conjunction superior to the same-sex analogues. "Gender-balancing" (rather, sex-balancing) parents may not share Justice Ginsburg's sweeping heterosexist view that sex-mixed social groups are generally superior, but presumably they do believe that families with children of both sexes are superior to those with only boys or girls. Or, at least they must believe that their own lopsided or "unbalanced" family would be very much better. Why else would they want to add a child if and only if it is of the "opposite," that is, complementary sex? And, no doubt they will also believe that the same holds true for parents: far better two parents of "opposite" sexes than of the same sex, not to mention the "incomplete" family with only one parent.

Robertson's policy suggestions support such heterosexist beliefs. By limiting PSS to couples with at least one child, he excludes couples who want an "unbalanced" family of just one child or several children of the same sex. He also excludes people who want a doubly unbalanced family, namely, same-sex couples and single people who want just one child or several children of the same sex.

Admittedly, he allows that physicians might with little sexist risk let couples select for girls, balancing aside. This more liberal policy still excludes people with special, credible reasons for wanting a single boy, or only boys. For example, a single man may feel far more confident of being able to raise a son without a partner, or a single woman with brothers might be able to count on their help raising a nephew, but not a niece. Likewise, lesbian couples might suppose that they and a son would face less bigoted suspicions about their influence on his sexual orientation, especially during adolescence. Such reasons may themselves reflect the common belief that the sexes do differ in ways significant to parental and family life, but they do not imply that those differences complement or balance one another in ways that make two-sex couples with both boys and girls the ideal family constellation.

Admittedly, there may be relatively few such parents wanting only sons, but, as a champion of procreative liberty, Robertson should give them more weight than their numbers alone might merit. For them, but not for sex-blenders, sons may well be "central to their personal identity, meaning, and dignity" and to their "procreative identity or life-plan" (Robertson 1994, 30, 33) Indeed, sex-balancing parents who claim such personal import for a son might well believe that sons are the only true proof of a father's virility, or a mother's full procreative prowess, or some such sexist dogma.

As a champion of individual autonomy in general, Robertson has a further reason for including son-seeking single parents...