Am I using correct parallelism in the following sentence?
They say the place where you are born is not a choice, as it is not the family into which you are born.
If the above sentence uses correct parallelism, can I reduce it as follows?
They say the place where you are born is not a choice, as it is not the family.
or
They say the place where you are born is not a choice, as it is not your family.
Would the following examples with "nor," "or," and "neither… nor" be valid alternatives (with correct parallelism) to the original example?
They say you don't choose where you are born, nor do you choose your family.
They say you don't choose your country or your family.
They say you neither choose your country nor your family.
Best Answer
As others have said, your first example does not have the meaning you want, because "it" is not read as a dummy subject.
If you leave out the "it", you get something that nearly works
But it doesn't quite work, because there is no satisfactory placement for the 'not'. If you cast it as positive, it works:
This is grammatical and readily understandable.
But for the negative case, I would use "and neither":
You could alternatively use "nor":