My husband and I are expecting a baby next month, and we do not know the baby’s sex.
...
In my case, quite a few of the people who have questioned our decision not to find out the baby’s sex are the kinds of well-off, self-styled progressives who in other kinds of conversations can be counted on to talk about the fluidity of gender identity. They are people who don’t believe all girls have to like princesses or all boys have to like football.
How do we explain a culture that tells children that sex doesn’t matter much, that “girls can do anything boys can do,†and at the same moment is treating the sex of infants in the womb as this critical, determining fact?
One part of the story here, I think, is a lesson in how easy it is for us to become governed by the technologies of our age. The cultural obsession with knowing a baby’s sex before birth allows us to see the way in which our sense of priorities can come to be dominated – dictated, even – by the technological innovations of the moment.
...
My suspicion is that American parents are now going overboard with all this attention to prenatal sex – with companies named things like “Fetal Greetings†selling baby-sex announcements and the emergence of something called “gender cakes†– because it is just about the only thing they can know about their babies before those babies are born. Because it is a fact that parents know, it is a fact they come to emphasize and value – and then, to overemphasize and overvalue.
...
Indeed, modern technologies do expand our capacity to know and reflect upon many things. But they can also restrict and narrow our thinking.
In the case of prenatal sexing of babies – in overemphasizing the importance of that information – what can get lost is the fact that a person’s sex does not reveal much about who a person is or might be (in the basic terms of character or discipline or virtue), as Socrates argued so long ago. Even more fundamentally, what can get lost is the wonderful unknowability of babies, itself a reflection of the mystery and unpredictability of us all.
...
But in this and other cases we should be careful not to overvalue those little things that we know, to the point that we neglect the enduring truth about our lives, that we are all partners in this grand mystery, the depths of which we cannot fathom and the extent of which we will never see. When we remember that, I think, we remember why we call it the miracle of life.
