Familiy Balancing - Gender Selection

Understanding Your Fertility Cycle

Use your fertility cycles to the maximum advantage and learn to understand your reproductive cycles, and how to tap into them for purposes of fertility and awareness. Acknowledgment of these physical, psychological and psychic patterns can be immensely rewarding. 

History of Sex Selection

Gender Selection has been discussed and pondered by couples for as far back as recorded history allows. From prehistoric times, to early Asian, Egytptian and Greek cultures, to documented scientific efforts begining in the 1600's, various methods have been attempted, with varying levels of success.. Research and work carried out in the 1980's and 90's have finally provided methods offering the chance of obtaining a desired pregnancy gender outcome with very reliable results.

Understanding what determines Gender

It has been known for many years that the gender of a pregnancy is determined by the sex chromosome carried by the sperm. Sperm bearing an "X" chromosome, when united with the "X" from the female (females only produce "X") will result in an "XX" pregnancy that produces a female. If a sperm bearing a "Y" chromosome (men have both "X" and "Y" bearing sperm) unites with the "X" chromosome from the female, an "XY" pregnancy will result that gives rise to a male offspring.

Knowing this, science has worked to allow for an accurate method of safely separating sperm to allow only those "Y" sperm to access the female egg. While a variety of methods have been reported and studied, very few have withstood scientific scrutiny.

The Center for Fertility and Gynecology, located in Los Angeles, California, can help you balance your family, using proven scientific methods. We make sex selection available to all patients seeking to assure themselves that a pregnancy will result in the gender outcome they desire.

Questions about Gender Selection

Sex selection is a very difficult procedure to obtain in the United States and world wide. Our unmatched, extensive experience with gender selection and our review of world literature allows us to offer the following information and answers to questions:

• Has gender selection produced a reasonable number of successes?
  Absolutely! While success rates vary between programs, most programs employing standard sperm separation procedures report success rates in the 60-68 percent range. Success with IVF-PGD approaches 100% worldwide.
  
  
• How many babies have been born as a result of sex selection?
  Thousands of healthy babies have been born following sex selection procedures.
  
  
• Is there an increased risk of a birth defect after the sex selection procedure?
  No. Many studies have been carried out on artificial insemination procedures. These studies, looking at fresh, frozen, washed and isolated sperm show no increase in the occurence of birth defects when compared to natural conception.
  
• Can frozen sperm be used for sex selection?
  Yes. Frozen sperm are subject to the same evaluation studies as fresh sperm to determine suitability for separation.
  
• Can sex selection be performed with "regular" In Vitro Fertilization?
  Yes.

The Ethics of Family Balancing

In 1994, the International Federation of Gynecologists and Obstetricians Committee for the Ethical Aspects of Human Reproduction and Women's Health stated that 

"preconceptional sex selection can be justified on social grounds in certain cases for the objective of allowing children of the two sexes to enjoy the love and care of parents."

The American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) Ethics Committee published a report (Fertility and Sterility, May 2001) concerning the use of preconception gender selection for non-medical reasons. The Ethics Committee recognized that 

"parents have traditionally had great discretion in their procreative decisions and that sex selection might provide perceived individual and social goods such as gender balance or distribution in a family with more than one child, parental companionship with a child of one's own gender, and a preferred gender order among one's children".  

The ASRM Committee recommendations included 

"...the most prudent approach at present for the non-medical use of these techniques would be to use them only for gender variety in a family, i.e., only to have a child of the gender opposite of an existing child or children.  If the social, psychological, and demographic effects of those uses of preconception gender selection have been found acceptable, then other non-medical uses of preconception selection might be considered."