And why should it be okay to abort a fetus (because it’s gay) but not to turn it straight? If a person came up to me on the street and said, “Either I’ll crack open your skull and suck out your brain, or I’ll make you straight,” I suspect I’d go ahead and pick the latter.

Fetuses are not, in a moral sense at the very least, human beings. If killing them isn’t unethical (and it’s not) then giving them “plastic surgery” surely isn’t either.

However, when you start talking about biomedical interventions that are sufficiently invasive that they have to be administered by a health care professional, I think that’s a pretty good heuristic for “too risky.”

I don’t think parents have the right to subject their future offspring to any significant risk in order to secure a preferred sexual orientation, or eye color.

Suppose that a fetus is not morally valueless or without rights — it’s just that its right to life is judged less valuable than a woman’s right to bodily integrity. (Some people, in fact, believe that the fetus is fully a person and still that its right to life does not trump the mother’s right to bodily integrity, though this is not a view that I hold).

The key insight, I think, is to point out that “bodily integrity” is a fairly narrow right. Your bodily integrity is not affected by whether your fetus is homosexual or heterosexual. Thus, you have no affirmative right to know the fetus’ future sexuality. If one holds that, for example, the fetus has a right to privacy with respect to its future sexuality, there is no particular right of the mother’s that trumps that right. The mother could still choose to abort the child for any reason (maybe she learns that the father is homosexual), she just doesn’t have the right to ask someone to poke the fetus and find out.

Note that the mother WOULD have a right to find out if the fetus has or would likely develop any medical conditions which would complicate the pregnancy, as there her bodily integrity right comes into play.

Similarly, we might imagine a view that a fetus has rights to self-determination with respect to most of its medical state, where the rights of parents only narrowly intrude, and thus no treatment is possible. (It would make sense, in this case, to similarly restrict any treatment until a person had become a legal adult — so you couldn’t force a homosexuality “cure” on your kid at age 8, if that someday becomes possible, but an informed adult could get his or her sexuality medically changed if he or she wanted to).

Certainly, if it someday becomes possible to learn things like “is person A homosexual” via a genetic screening, we will want a personal right to genetic privacy. It doesn’t seem unreasonable to extend that backwards into the pre-natal world, as otherwise the right could be pretty easily abrogated.

(I think it is unlikely, that anything more than a statistical tendancy towards particular sexual orientations will be found on the genetic level, which, if anything, makes the idea of treating/screening for homosexuality pre-natally more horrifying.)

I’m of the opinion that fetuses aren’t people and that a woman has a right to abort any fetus for any reason. I certainly find it creepy that people abort fetuses based on their gender. I also find it creepy that people spend a lot of money centrifuging their sperm in order to sex-select their children pre-conception. It unnerves me that people care so much about gender, but I won’t say that these specific measures are wrong.*

My tentative view is that it’s okay to abort a fetus for any reason, including the result of some hypothetical medical test for heterosexuality or blue eyes or left-handedness. It’s okay to abort a fetus just because now’s not a convenient time to be pregnant. If you don’t like the fetus you got by luck, you can abort and start over. The factors that influence such a decision might reflect very badly on your character. If you’re aborting for height or body build or sexual orientation or gender, you’re revealing yourself to be a horrifyingly shallow person, or worse.

On the other hand, I think that it’s wrong to keep a fetus and start subjecting it to so-called medical treatments in utero to change its orientation before birth. It’s frivolous for parents to start doing the equivalent of plastic surgery on their unborn children, with all the attendant risks (moral and physical). Heterosexuality is not a disease, and neither is homosexuality. Having a big nose isn’t a disease, nor an adult height of 5’2″. There’s evidence that your life will go significantly better if you’re better looking, but nobody thinks it’s okay for parents to start doing plastic surgery in utero.

*It might be irresponsible to sex-select your child in a society where sex selection is throwing off the gender balance of an entire generation, but that’s a separate question. Likewise, it’s probably somewhat socially irresponsible to encourage couples to order up their future children a la carte. We’ve seen what humans do to the gene pools of purebred animals by aggressively selecting for superficially desirable characteristics.