other event in a parent's life can match the joy and anticipation of having a baby. Discovering the gender of the child inside a mother's womb is always a momentous occasion, with parents relying on ultrasound to see if their baby is a boy or a girl.

Some parents nowadays, however, are taking a questionably active role in picking their baby's gender before he or she even enters the womb. This scientific advancement, no matter how impressive it may sound, has very serious moral consequences, an ethicist warned.

Dr. John Brehany, an ethicist and director of institutional relations at the National Catholic Bioethics Center, likened the practice of sex selection to just "delivering a product" instead of procreating a precious human life.

Sex selection is also clearly against teachings in the Holy Bible, he added.

"First and foremost, it separates procreation from incarnated marital love," Brehany told The Catholic News Agency. He explained that for sex selection to happen, the meeting of the sperm and the egg cells should happen within the laboratory, and not through the natural process of procreation.

"It separates procreation from the manner in which God has designed human beings to come in to being, which should be in an actual act of marital love," he added.

Brehany further said that gender selection through assisted reproductive methods "almost instantly subjects the child to the standards and sort of the pressures, if you will, of production, and of producing an object."

This kind of procedure is equivalent to "ultimately taking actions to simply throw out" and "discard human beings," he added.

Alarmingly, however, more and more parents are opting to choose the gender of their babies, Anna Higgins, an associate scholar at the pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute, also told The Catholic News Agency.

Higgins, who conducted a study on abortions related to sex selection procedures, said the increase in the number of parents choosing to select the gender of their child is evident based on doctors' statements and the higher number of clinics advertising this procedure.

Brehany, however, warned that this procedure may ultimately hurt the embryo. Other human embryos not chosen would have to be discarded or frozen—which is tantamount to abortion.