By MONROE ROARK
mroark@thecitizennews.com

I have a young cousin who was about four years old when her parents discovered that they were expecting again. She was with her visibly pregnant mother at a store when they met another lady who struck up a conversation with the youngster.

"So, would you rather have a little brother or a little sister?" she asked.

The girl, with all the seriousness a four-year-old could muster, replied, "You don't get to choose."

As you know if you follow news from the medical community with any regularity, there are people out there trying to change that.

A doctor in Belgium has garnered a bit of notoriety in recent months for his claims that he can help a couple choose the sex of their child. The University of Ghent professor has already begun treating five women from various European countries, according to news reports. One is pregnant, while the other four await artificial insemination.

The meat of the process apparently involves sorting sperm according to chromosomes, whether they be of the X (female) or Y (male) variety. That work is reportedly done in the United States, by a company in Virginia called MicroSort.

According to MicroSort's Web site, the chances of success are 88 percent if the parents want a daughter, and 73 percent if they want a son. The site also says that 460 women have become pregnant using the treatment.

Back in Belgium, legislators are looking at passing a law banning this practice. The doctor said that if that happens, he will stop and abide by the law, but he feels like it should be permitted as long as it does not harm the children, the family or society.

Couples undergoing the treatment must already have a number of children, as the aim is to "balance the family," according to the doctor.

Maybe I'm a bit narrow-minded, but this whole thing gives me the creeps. Do we really want people to have the capability of making these kinds of decisions?

If this door gets open an inch, it will eventually swing wide and allow everything you can imagine. Prospective parents will be sorting through the gene pool at will, getting rid of whatever they don't approve of. You don't want a child with red hair and freckles? Fine. Afraid your kid might have a tendency to be overweight? No problem. Worried you might have a son or daughter with a low IQ? We can take care of that.

We as a society are beginning to prove that we can't even manage birth control properly, let alone the specifics of a child's characteristics. Birth rates in Western countries have fallen so rapidly in the past few decades that it will soon be impossible to reverse the trend, although Asian and African countries are still in a population boom. Given the events of the past couple of years, how does the idea of a Muslim majority in the United States and Europe sound? It could happen sooner than you think.

Then you have the masters of population control, the Chinese. Since their government's decision some 20 years ago to limit every family to one child, a generation of abortion on demand has resulted in a male-female ratio that is getting dangerously out of control. About 40 million young men in China have no prospects for marriage, because there simply are not enough women to go around, and the women are themselves such valuable commodities that kidnapping and slavery are real concerns in dozens of areas.

So while the "intellectuals" try to figure out how to do things better than God has done them the past few thousand years, here's a thought:

Take a look at the 2000 U.S. Census figures with regard to male and female population. The numbers are broken down by age in five-year increments (under five years old, 5-9, 10-14, 15-19, etc.), and it's uncanny how the genders are never more than 2 or 3 percentage points apart in any age group, until you get to age 70, where the longer-living women really warp the curve.

Think about it. Out of hundreds of millions of Americans, and millions in every age category, the male-female ratio is almost even. Same goes for world birth rates. If you allow a couple of points for margin of error, it could be even closer to 50-50, out of billions of people.

Could any reasonable person actually think that evolution would cause this?

[Monroe Roark can be reached at mroark@TheCitizenNews.com.]

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