Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies

James Hughes Ph.D., the IEET Executive Director, is a bioethicist and sociologist at Trinity College in Hartford Connecticut where he teaches Health Policy. He holds a doctorate in sociology from the University of Chicago, where he also taught bioethics. Dr. Hughes is author of Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future (Westview Press, 2004), and produces a syndicated weekly radio program, Changesurfer Radio. He is a Fellow of the World Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities and the Working Group on Ethics and Technology at Yale University. Dr. Hughes speaks on medical ethics, health care policy and future studies worldwide, and appears often radio and television.

A woman’s right to know the contents of her own body, and to make a choice about whether to continue her pregnancy or not, should be defended against laws trying to stop prenatal sex selection, either in the developing world or in the developed world. Restrictions on women’s reproductive freedom harm the interests of women and girls, and ignore myriad social policy solutions, such as education and income incentives to have girls and universal old age pensions, that provide better answers to the strains of unbalanced sex ratios. The opponents of sex selection trumpet all accounts of increased discrimination against women resulting from unequal sex ratios while ignoring growing evidence of positive cultural change and women’s empowerment from women’s enhanced marriage prospects. Opponents of sex selection reify a conservative heteronormative model of sexuality, gender roles and family structure, while arguing that unmarried men are social time bombs who can only be controlled by a wife. Eventually the social policy dilemma of sex selection will be made moot since would-be parents will be able to use pre-conceptive technology to determine a conceptus’s gender without abortion or in-vitro fertilization. But until the sex selection argument unravels before technological innovation, women’s rights to control their bodies must be defended against laws banning prenatal ultrasound and abortion.  (Full text available here.)