• If people are already considering IVF, it may be easier to overcome one of the greatest hurdles towards this solution: cost. Only those who can afford IVF would choose this (and probably not those with male partners, if I had to guess?), so any moral or practical objections towards IVF itself would already be overridden. I believe IVF is also already increasing in frequency, since fertility rates are going down and the number of single mothers by choice (SMBC) are going up. That is, there is a general audience for IVF; the step towards using IVF to select for girls would be a smaller one than first trying to convince an audience to go for IVF, then sex-selecting. 
  
• Women are growing increasingly aware of the extent of male violence with the emergence of the Internet. We're able to access statistics on male violence towards women and girls, and there are high-profile cases of male violence that likely would have been hushed up in the past (e.g. Gisele Pelicot's case, which was an example of how even wives are not protected from other men by their husbands. A cornerstone of patriarchal marriage). 
  
• I specifically mention sex-selective IVF as opposed to sex-selective abortion because there are many women who would be against aborting their own fetus, even if they are legally pro-choice. If you bring up anything about sex selection to such women, they may picture strangling male infants in their own cribs, or just find the idea of "killing" boys off-putting. But with IVF, this consideration vanishes. Literally no boys are "killed". I may not agree with these women, but I believe that the idea of sex-selective IVF needs to appeal to women from all walks of life to work, as women don't seem to have the solidarity that men do. Some women may be against abortion. Some women may even prefer a daughter for reasons outside of altering the human sex ratio. But the important part is that it happens to begin with, and then we can deal with any major cultural changes downstream. 
  

• IVF is incredibly expensive as of right now. I think the situation may improve as technology and demand progress further, kind of like how computers got less expensive, etc. There are medical procedures which never really came down in price, but I believe that the demand has to do with it. Because of the aforementioned fertility rate drops and the fact that more people want IVF for other reasons, I think the problem of cost may be surmountable. 
  
• There are obviously people who are against sex selection on principle. They may point to countries like China or India, where an overabundance of men exist and women are trafficked as brides. I think this would not be a problem with women... There is no longstanding tradition of men being trafficked for such purposes, for one. And the threat of crime from millions of restless, unpaired individuals is, I would think, diminished if those individuals are female versus male. I mean, I myself am agnostic to the causes of male violence. Genetic, environmental, both... Not really my concern, at this point. My main contention is that it exists, and we need to do something about it. We can observe that men are more violent than women in pretty much every arena of life (control for the number of men involved, of course), so why would that change all of a sudden with an increase in the proportion of women? People would have to provide a mechanism for this, or otherwise you could point out how they're engaging in wild speculation for who knows what reason...
  
  Even if women became more violent as a result of becoming a significant majority, however, you can always ask why the other person has a problem with decreasing the incidence of crimes like PIV rape. Of course, there are women who do commit heinous crimes, and men who don't. But there's not much of a reason to purposefully bring a person with a natural weapon into the world, is there? Anything good a man has done (and of course men have created many useful things, can be wonderful people (up for debate, I suppose)), a woman can also do, and without incurring the risk of gang rape, war rape, and other crimes that are more easily committed with a penis. Someone arguing against the idea of selecting for a girl would have to defend leaving it up to chance, or actively choosing a child that just comes with more downsides than a child of the female sex, with the same upsides at best. There's no moral justification in letting "nature" or random chance decide when humans can make choices that will improve our situation as a species; that's just a coward's choice. 
  

• If people are worried that the mere existence of this choice will destabilize a society, you can always point them to Iceland. Genetic screening hasn't turned that country into a fire and brimstone pit, and I doubt taking out a chunk of the male proportion would actually harm anything. So you would see more women than men on a daily basis. Maybe, depending on the optimal proportion, you would barely see any male people anymore. But frankly, so what? Is it really that important that 50% of the population has a penis? It goes back to what I said earlier about penises... They're neutral at best and a liability at worst. If you replaced many of the men in this world with a female version of themselves, I'm pretty sure the world would become safer, at the very least. 

• Sex selection may pose a threat to the population size of humans. I think because of reproductive dynamics, it is not necessary to have as many men around as some people might think. (Also, see what happens after major wars.) Since sex selection would likely be an incremental process as more and more women get on board, the proportion of men could possibly be "titrated" to prevent pure logistical issues regarding reproduction and the partnering of heterosexual women. The existence of sperm banks already shows that only a small number of men are required for women to keep having children at a feasible level. 
  As for genetic diversity, sperm samples could be retrieved from a large number of men... I'm sure there would be many willing to donate if IVF became more popular and visible. Just because some men might be more immediately popular as donors doesn't mean that we couldn't go into gene libraries if, say, a new pathogen came about... Different women might prefer different traits, anyway, so I don't think the population would be that homogenous. Education can be provided on the perils of low genetic diversity. 
  

(Apr 26 2025, 2:47 AM)niffin The ethics of this don't bother me at all. If one could somehow magic away the cost/burdens to the mother doing IVF, and one were doing IVF for whatever reason anyway, then yeah, sure why not? However, there are some other cost/burdens that I think you skipped over: if you're doing any kind of embryo screening, you need to expect to be throwing out some number of embryos, and that means (financial costs aside) that you're going to need to harvest proportionately more eggs in order to still have enough to get even one successful implantation. And unfortunately that harvesting process has risks that aren't insignificant and hurts (and is expensive too).

So I don't think that I would get behind recommending sex-selective IVF to _everyone_. But actually I'm against IVF in general; we have way too many kids in desperate need of foster/adoptive care, so I resent my local government providing subsidies for IVF instead of improving the adoption system.

So I suppose that maybe a compromise might be: if you're going to use public funds to do IVF, it _must_ be sex selective for females only. I could get behind that.