The act of giving birth is without doubt the most beautiful act of nature. What could be more wonderful than the miracle of birth? However, and as is the case with so many other factors of our daily lives, modern medicine has played a hand in how and when births occur, and with the sole intention of making this sometimes traumatic process as easy for the mother and the baby as possible.

Without doubt the largest benefit has been the development of the ultrasound which began to become common practice of determining the state of the health of the unborn fetus as early as the 18th week of its conception. In the early days of ultrasound, information was sketchy, however as the technology developed, doctors are more and more capable of diagnosing defects in the pregnancy’s development and in the unborn baby, and are prepared for most eventualities.

Today there are no surprises, and a side effect of the ultrasound development is that parents can be made aware of the sex of their unborn child almost six months before he or she comes into the World.

There are conflicting arguments on the merits of this development. One says that the excitement of birth is lessened by knowing the sex of the baby in advance, and others, in fact the great majority, claim that it is better to know whether the baby will be a boy or a girl and plan accordingly.

However in recent times a deeper and more wide ranging argument has developed and that is an ethical one on the question of being able not only to identify a baby’s gender before it is born but also to determine it.

Scientific and medical advances in this field have made it theoretically possible to determine the sex of a child. The question of whether sex selection is medically possible is beyond doubt. The ethical issue in this case will be a much larger one. Let us imagine a family that has five sons, and are eating their hearts out to have a daughter.

Or vice versa. In a situation such as this, then it might be possible to consider helping the family to determine the sex of their next child. The situation only becomes uncomfortable where the family has decided to pre determine the sex of their only child. This kind of scenario of repeated on a national, international or global level could bring about a situation where there is unnatural imbalance of males or females in the World. With the obvious consequences.

There has been much discussion on the subject, and many people feel that sex selection should not be an option in the majority of cases. Only in exceptional circumstances as in the case of large families of same sex children, or for medical reasons. One particular example should be when there is a strong background of breast cancer in the family.

To prevent the likelihood of future suffering, then the mother should be allowed only to give birth to males, especially as she is liable to suffer from breast cancer herself. Other than intervention through medicine, there is still an outside chance of couples determine the sex off their child through timing their intercourse during certain days of the month of the woman’s menstrual cycle.

While this is a real "hit and a miss "affair, the medical profession feels much more comfortable with this sex selection method than any which is medically controlled. Parents should not be allowed to determine the sex of their children on a whim. They feel, and maybe rightly so, that the miracle of birth is far too sacred a blessing to be treated lightly.