Sex selection is an ancient and persistent practice. At some times and in some places, parents have selected the sex of their children by killing newborns or neglecting babies of the undesired sex, almost always female. In the twenty-first century, technological developments and marketing practices are bringing new attention to sex selection, and raising an array of new concerns about it.

Some bioethicists and others defend sex selection as a matter of parental choice or "procreative liberty" (Robertson 2001). Others are highly critical, arguing that sex selection reflects and reinforces misogyny and gender stereotypes, undermines the wellbeing of children by subjecting them to excessive parental disappointment or expectations, and sets the groundwork for the future accessorizing and commodifying of children. The spread of prenatal screening for sex selection has caused alarm because of increasingly skewed sex ratios in some areas. Newer technologies now being used for sex...