Male or Female We Will Create Them: The Ethics of Sex Selection for Non-medical Reasons

It is sometimes instructive to start from the beginning. On the sixth day of creation, God created man, “in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them” (Gen. 1: 27). God’ choice is to create man in the generic sense (which reflects God’ own a-sexual nature). The split of male and female, that is the move from “him” to “them”, is only derivative, though necessary, since only by such a split can humans pro-create themselves, thereby reflecting God’s unlimited creative power [1]. But then there, is of course, the other version of the creation story. God first created Adam, “man” in a specifically male form, and only upon realizing that “it is not for man to be alone” he decided to make “a fitting helper for him” (Gen. 2: 18). If, as I read the biblical text, the image of God in which human beings are made amounts to the power of procreation, then the two versions of the creation of “man” suggest two alternatives for approaching the problem of sex selection.