What Are Little Boys Made of?: The Never-Ending Search for Sex Selection Techniques

WHAT ARE LITTLE BOYS MADE OF? THE NEVER-ENDING SEARCH FOR SEX SELECTION TECHNIQUES JONATHAN SCHAFFIR* A baby's gender is traditionally a chance outcome—half the time a girl is born, half the time it is a boy. Despite the biological logic of this arrangement, mothers and fathers often desire to change these odds. From Hippocrates to modern geneticists, scientists have sought to help parents to take control in choosing the gender of their offspring. Such a desire can be based on various cultural and social factors. In societies where women are relegated to a lower social, legal, or economic status (which includes almost all of those in Western history), the tendency for both men and women is to desire masculine offspring [I]. The trend has shifted somewhat in present times; modern-day Americans who express a preference for children of a particular sex generally seek to produce a child of the sex different from that of the child they already have [2]. Regardless of motivation, the wish to have a child of one gender or the other has resulted in the formulation of numerous theories and recipes for sex selection through the ages. The number of theories that have taken shape is beyond the scope of anything but a lengthy book. In 1910 one author stated "some have gone so far as to say that the numbers of sex-determining theories have reached into the thousands" [3]. Most of these have been rather outlandish , far outside the mainstream of medical or even popular thought. A medieval text of midwifery, for example, recommended ingesting dried rabbit genitals corresponding with the desired gender [4]; a relatively modern theory instructs mothers desiring sons to eat a diet rich in cerThe author gratefully acknowledges the kind assistance of Dr. Lucile Newman and Kimber Gross of the Brown University Department of Anthropology and the staff of the Countway Medical Library Rare Books Room in the preparation of this paper. *Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Mt. Sinai Hospital, 1176 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10029.© 1991 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 003 1-5982/9 1 /3404-0748$0 1 .00 516 Jonathan Schaffir ¦ Sex Selection Techniques tain minerals [5]. While such ideas are intriguing and even amusing, this article will focus instead on the theories in the mainstream of Western medical thought and the development of more recent techniques designed to threaten the even ratio of men to women. The Right versus Left Theories The idea that gender is determined by one side of the body or the other is one of the oldest extant theories, found in several ancient Greek and Roman texts. Commonly, the right side was associated with males and the left side with females. Hippocrates mentions this phenomenon in one of his aphorisms: "A male fetus inclines to the right, a female to the left" [6]. A more complex form of the idea was proposed nearly 100 years earlier by the fifth-century b.c. author Parmenides, who suggested that a woman could ensure that she would have a son by lying on her right side immediately after intercourse to allow the seed to settle there [7]. Other versions were entertained, if not supported, by Anaxagoras [8], Aristotle [8], and Soranus [9]. Differences were commonly ascribed to the right and left sides of the body throughout history. In a predominantly right-handed civilization, the right hand is perceived as stronger and more skilled, whereas the left hand is weak and awkward. The Latin-derived adjectives "dextrous" and "sinister" remind us of the connotations given to right and left, respectively. Since men were similarly perceived to be stronger and dominant, it seemed natural to the ancients that they should come from the right side of the body. Ancient theory was also shaped by the humor concept of hot and cold. Males were felt to have more natural heat, as Hippocrates stated: "Males, inclined to fire, grow from foods and regimen that are dry and warm" [10]. Because the liver, which lies on the right side of the body, was viewed as a "hot" organ, it was thought that the right side of the uterus would furnish...