Brigade XO wrote:Another piece about what is next for Grayson.....Allison Harrington. Remember the conversation she had with the head of the Grayson Church? The one where she laid out what she had discovered about why the massively high rate of stillbirths and miscarrages of male children, and that she had a way to deal with that?
Presuming that Grayson is going to go along with the Beowulf Code and NOT ALLOW parents to select for one sex over the other, there are going to be a couple of things happening as soon as all of this works it's way though the Church and the solution (aka gene cleaning) make it out to the public in addressing both the unintended consequences of the fixed modification AND the rising birth rate.
Yeah, rising. Some of that because there will be a lot of families who are likely to try for sons- and along with those sons will also (remember there will be both the medical ethics and Church position on unborn children) be more daughters being born- and people will keep trying for sons. Like opening the floodgates because they can expect more pregnancies to be successful & result in sons. It's just that to have that result there will also be a number of more daughters to go along with it.
I am with you on most of what you write, but you lose me on the part that I have highlighted. After Alison's fixes work their way into the population; there would actually be fewer births, if people are only trying until they have a boy. The reason is that the fix makes it easier to produce a healthy boy; up until now pregnancy was much more likely to produce a girl, because a male fetus was more prone to result in a miscarriage.
I do not have the math working, but after the fix is in the proportions should be close to 50-50. Prior to the fix out of every 8 pregnancies, 4 would result in girls, 3 in miscarriages and then 1 healthy boy (I did not look up the ratio: this was for 1 boy to every 4 girls. If it really is 1 to 3, then the numbers out of 6 are 3, 2 and 1). Someone else can figure the expected population rate, if each family (or mother) stops having children after the first boy is born (or some limit on pregnancies is hit); when the odds of not having a boy are 50% after the fix versus either 87.5% or 83.3% before the fix. Whether this is one per family or one per mother is another variable.
PS. AAC describes the Moriarty system, it does not mention the system defense called Mycroft.