“You’ll change your mind when you get older.” This is what people are always telling me when I state, firmly and without question, that I don’t want children. “You’ll change your mind,” they say, shaking their heads and clucking their tongues, as if somehow getting older will suddenly make me want to tie myself down to one person, grow a parasitic-like life form in my body for an excruciating nine months during which I will probably vomit a lot and have to pee every five minutes, gain weight I will probably never lose, and then actually have to birth the thing. If there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s that my vagina, if not me, does not want to be subjected to something that large trying to push its way out. Hell no.

I have an aversion to the whole baby thing. The pregnancy, the birthing, the raising of the child. I have a feeling I’d completely fuck it up and my kid would end up being the next Charles Mason. I’d almost certainly make him gay by naming him something ridiculous like Jesus or Lance or Jane and forcing him to take ballet classes instead of football, because seriously, even for a child (or maybe especially for a child), I am not going to watch football. So really, it’s best that I not have babies.

Of course, I’ve always said that, if I ever mysteriously got pregnant, I wouldn’t get an abortion. It’s not that I’m averse to abortions, because I firmly believe in a woman’s right to choose, but I don’t think I could actually go through with one. Philosophically, however, a woman owns her own body and has a right to decide what happens to and in it. If she doesn’t want a parasitic life form growing inside her, making her fat and bloated and nauseous, then I completely understand.

By now you’re probably wondering what the hell this has to do with GLBT news. I’ll be honest with you–so far, not much. Actually, it has more to do with sheep than anything else. Gay sheep. Gay sheep that can be de-gayed through the use of hormone treatments in order to get them interested in ewes for breeding purposes.

This discovery has shaken the liberals in the world of science. We’ve always suspected there is likely a genetic component to homosexuality, but for the most part no one has been looking for it. Conservatives don’t want to find it because they believe homosexuality is a choice; liberals don’t want to find it because, as with gay sheep (and man, I never thought I’d hear myself say that in a sentence), they don’t want scientists to also discover a way to prevent or “cure” homosexuality, even if such a preventative measure would mean early detection via genetics resulting in abortion.

Because that’s the next step, isn’t it? In developing nations across the world, and even some first world nations, people practice selective abortion. This has been happening in Asia for decades, particularly in China where there is a limit on the number of children one can have, and in India and Africa, where having girls is far more expensive than having boys. People in the United States abort if a genetic disease is found early enough, such as Down’s syndrome. If scientists are able to find the genetic component that causes homosexuality in humans, isn’t selective abortion the next step? Could homosexuality become a genetic disease, like Down’s, to which parents just can’t bear to subject their children?

People are always saying, “If I could choose my sexuality, do you really think I’d choose to be gay?” For me, the answer is YES. If we weren’t gay, who would we be? We wouldn’t be us; we’d be someone else, with different life experiences and a different sense of community and socialization. Being gay isn’t just a genetic happenstance, it’s an entire culture. Like Judaism, with more buttsex. Allegedly.

As a parent, however, especially in the United States where nearly half the country still believes that gays do not deserve equal rights and votes to keep discrimination in place, if they could choose whether or not to have a gay child? It would be quite the conundrum. On the one hand, most of the same people who believe homosexuality is an abomination also believe that abortion is murder.

Andrew Sullivan addresses this question in his essay from the Sunday Times:

“In such a world, liberals and conservatives would be at sea. America’s religious right would have to make a choice between its goal of ridding the world of homosexuality and its strong opposition to abortion. Liberals would have to concede that genetics do indeed matter, and deal with the consequences. But how could they square their support for the right to abortion if it meant the deliberate extinction of a beleaguered minority?”

Because this is what we’re talking about–deliberate extinction, which is just a nicer term for genocide. As gruesome as the idea is, if Christianists and ultra-conservatives had the ability to detect homosexuality in the womb, what’s to stop them from deciding that homosexuality is a bigger sin than abortion, and selectively ridding themselves of unborn children who possess the gay gene? By the same token, liberals have to take a step back and ask themselves: how important is choice, really? Is it more important the preservation of an entire class of people?

In the end, I don’t think that what Sullivan and others fear would actually happen–that intra-womb gaydar would mean the end of homosexuality altogether. But mostly this is because I have a lot of faith in Christianists’ ability to ignore scientific evidence, believe every life is sacred, and convince themselves that it’s their duty to have as many babies as humanely possible. Besides, accepting that homosexuality is based on genetic makeup would force ultra-conservative religious types to also accept that God really did make us this way, and He wants us to be gay. I think this is a little too much logic for people who still believe the earth was only created 2000 years ago, that dinosaurs are a liberal scientist conspiracy against God, and that global warming is just a figment of Al Gore’s imagination. I’ve read the Chicklet pamphlets, so I know.

Besides which, I bet Corky’s parents are pretty damned happy they didn’t abort him back in the day. Science, like sex, isn’t good or bad, it just IS. It’s what we do with it, our intentions behind its use that has the potential to create problems. I’d like to believe in a world where no one would abort their child because he or she might turn out gay. No, I don’t have anything else to add to that; just, I would like to believe in that world. And maybe someday, the world will honor my faith, but until then, we’ll always have San Francisco.

Follow-up Links:
+I’m gay and soon science may be able to tell me why by Andrew Sullivan, from the Sunday Times.
+Gay sheep study info from the Seattle Times.
+James Joyner’s take on the study, discussing whether choosing heterosexuality for your unborn child is inherently homophobic.