Prior to having a child, many couples know whether they wish to raise a boy or a girl; some parents feel so strongly about this gender difference that they will go to nearly any lengths to achieve a desired outcome, even if that means consuming unfathomable amounts of certain foods. Such behavior is currently restricted to a rather small minority of future parents; however, with the technological improvement and growing popularity of in vitro fertilization, the ability to determine one’s child’s gender with near-complete certainty is becoming an increasingly common factor of pregnancy and childbirth.

With that being said, has anyone truly considered the moral standards behind this procedure? I, personally, believe that it is wrong for people to want—let alone be able to—choose the sex of their offspring. It does not matter if one has a boy or a girl—he or she will still be just as beautiful and amazing as any other child, of the same gender or of the opposite. One’s child is going to take after them regardless of their biological gender; as such, why anyone would feel a need to choose their sex is beyond me. Parents-to-be should feel lucky to even possess the ability to have a baby, in contrast to the millions of women in this world who have attempted to become pregnant many times over with no success. We should give up our sense of entitlement to having these precious bundles of joy, and stop to think about morals for a moment and realize that not everything that we can achieve technologically should be done.

Additionally, we need to consider that gender preferences will most likely be skewed toward one sex, causing an unbalance in the population. Men may, for the sake of personal pride and patriarchy, wish to pass on their genes and outnumber females, which would lead to significant decreases in population growth and general ease of procreation. In such a scenario, the government would be forced to intervene for its own preservation and would most likely restrict or ban performance of fetal gender determination, leaving the affected nation(s) where they were before (albeit significantly more unbalanced in sex). Thus, I believe that we, as a society, should abstain from choosing our children’s genders, regardless of how much we may want to; in my eyes, such a luxury is unjustified when compared to the moral and physical consequences which would follow its large-scale implementation. Nature should take its course.

Read more about this issue at CNN.