Will You Regret Paying $50,000 to Have a Girl?
This post was written in response to an article published by The Age this week entitled “I paid $50,000 to have a girl” and subtitled, ‘Jayne Cornwill argues the case for gender selection in Australia.’
Jayne’s story left me wanting to know a lot more about her decision, so here are the questions I would like to ask her if I could.
Dear Jayne,
I recently read your article about how you spent $50,000 to have a baby girl through Pre-Implantation Genetic Screening, using a procedure that is illegal in Australia. You use your story to argue the case for sex-selection in this country. Since there is a possibility that the taxes of pro-life people like me could be used to fund sex-selection IVF, just as we are made to fund sex-selection abortions, I think I have the right to ask you some questions.
I would like to know how your husband felt being used as a sperm donor for your IVF procedure. You didn’t have any fertility problems, and his part in the process was simply to provide sperm for you. Does he feel used? Does he feel disconnected from you or your daughter? Does he feel like a commodity?
I would like to know how your little boys will feel when they find out you cried when learning of their gender, that their being boys caused you severe depression and that you wanted to abort one of them. And how the third little one feels about you planning your PGS child and starting to save for the treatment, even while you were pregnant with him. Is it possible that despite your belief that your relationship with your sons is good, it will in fact be harmed by the knowledge of the efforts you went to in having a girl? Will you be able to explain to them the unnecessary risks you took to your own health by using IVF? (Read more here.)
How are you going to explain to your daughter that you spent so much money and effort using an unnatural method to procure her conception, when there is a possibility you could have naturally conceived her anyway? She now faces greater health risks due to her IVF conception. (See more here.) Will she be grateful for this?
Did you ever seek counselling for your ‘gender disappointment’? Most women who experience gender disappointment find that it ceases to be a problem once the baby is born. But professionals recommend therapy in cases where the condition lasts beyond a baby’s birth. In your case, it persisted beyond the birth of your sons - do you think it would have been wise of you to seek counselling before undertaking PGS?
I would like to know what has happened to your other children - you know - the ones who were ‘unwanted’; the other embryos, the ‘less-than-perfect’ girls and all the beautiful boy embryos? How many are there? Ten, twenty, thirty? Are they frozen? Were they donated to couples you will never know? Have they been experimented on and killed? Or were they thawed and tipped down a sink? (Read more about the IVF process at Dr. Potter’s site here.)
Excess embryos are formed in most IVF procedures, and yours would almost certainly have created excess male babies. Where are yours now?
Were their deaths worth the $50,000 you paid for your daughter?
Or given the consequences, does $50,000 seem like a small price to pay for your desire for a girl?
Please tell me if you are prepared to spend the rest of your life meeting couples who couldn’t conceive, and would have loved to take any child, regardless of gender or ability, but were unable to do so. Will you begin to hide the fact that you used IVF, because you can’t face these people?
I would like to know if you will feel bad if gender-selection becomes legal in Australia, and tax-payers are forced to subsidise the procedure; people who have lovingly accepted children from God as well as those who cannot conceive naturally will have to share in the payment for an unnecessary treatment. Do you think this is fair?
What if cases such as yours will be used to support infanticide based on gender? Will you regret your decision?
Have you thought about how similar your mentality is to that found in other cultures which routinely perform abortions, even forced abortions, due to babies being the wrong gender?
What will you say when you stand before God and tell Him how you frustrated His plan for marriage, that you chose to manipulate your fertility, that you did not even have the excuse that you were desperate for a child since you conceived three others naturally?
Will you one day regret your decision to use IVF based on the most frivolous of reasons - to select the gender of your child? And will you regret telling the world you paid $50,000 to have a girl?
Postscript: This is the link to a story by a woman who used IVF before converting and renouncing her involvement in the process. She conceived 31 children by this method and found a beautiful way to acknowledge the brief lives of the thirty who didn’t survive.
