Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of

unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street.

Critics of in vitro fertilization, IVF, have long warned that the technology could be used to

customize children, allowing parents and doctors to effectively play God.

According to a recent slate article, which sounded more like a review of the movie

Gadiga those fears were well founded according to the article and I quote

you can have a baby when it suits your career thanks to egg freezing, or at least you can try.

You can sequence your embryos genomes for $2,500 a pop

and attempt to maximize your future child's health,

or intelligence or attractiveness or height.

You can even select eye color.

There is a vast disparity between who gets to use IVF and who's using it to create designer families."

Another example of this is sex selection.

Numbers vary from clinic to clinic, but one Los Angeles-based

ibif clinic estimates that about 85% of its patients engage in sex selection.

However, which sex is being selected is historically surprising.

You see in the past, when parents have chosen between sons and daughters,

think for example of China under its one-child policy or the Romans who practice

infanticide by exposure, the boys won out.

But today, Americans using IVF

are abandoning the sons in favor of the daughters.

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