It’s generally agreed that sex-selection is a Bad Thing. In India and China, sons are favoured over daughters – but so are they in the USA, where the margin has only moved a few points since the 1940s; 38 per to 24 per cent then, 36 per cent to 28 per cent now.
Not surprisingly this overall preference is driven by men; 43 per cent preferred a son compared to 24 per cent who preferred a daughter while women showed no preference. This may be down to the somewhat doomy male perception that, as Billy Bigelow sang in the musical Carousel ‘You can have fun with a son – but you gotta be a father to a girl!’ This led Bigelow to take to a life of crime and be shot dead by the police before his daughter was born – so that worked out well.
The rise of trans-activism raises questions in this area for followers of the magical thinking associated with the lobby.
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