In the past decade, developments in the field of Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) have intensified the hopes and the desires of infertile people to overcome infertility, resulting in an increasing demand for such services worldwide. This review highlights anthropological research into SRTs in different parts of the world, discussing how selective reproduction engages with issues of long-standing theoretical concern in anthropology such as politics, kinship, gender, religion, globalization, and inequality. Although they will often overlap with assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs), what we term selective reproductive technologies (SRTs) are of a more specific nature: rather than aiming at overcoming infertility, they are used to prevent or allow the birth of certain kinds of children. New laboratory and clinical techniques allow for the selective fertilization of gametes, implantation of embryos, or abortion of fetuses. Yet in recent decades selective reproduction has been placed under the aegis of science and expertise in novel ways. Infanticide, abandonment, and selective neglect of children have a long history, and the widespread deployment of sterilization and forced abortion in the 20th century has been well documented. In a historical perspective, selective reproduction is nothing new.
Our findings suggest that the social conditions that contribute to prospective users' desires for gender balance in their families may direct them away from recognizing or engaging broader social justice concerns relating to sexism and stratified reproduction. Study participants indicated that an individual's desire for gender balance in their family is ethically complex and may not be inherently sexist, immoral or socially consequential, particularly given the social context in which they live. The results indicate that couples pursuing family balancing understand justice primarily in individualist and familial terms rather than in terms of social justice for women and girls or for children resulting from sex selection. This qualitative study provides a set of empirically-grounded perspectives on the moral values that underpin prospective users' conceptualizations of justice in the context of a family balancing program in the United States. However, prospective users' viewpoints have been absent from the debate over the socially acceptable bounds of non-medical sex selection. Bioethics and feminist scholarship has explored various justice implications of non-medical sex selection and family balancing.
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