Boy or Girl: Which Gender Baby Would You Pick?

Boy or Girl: Which Gender Baby Would You Pick?

By Bjorn Carey LiveScience Staff Writer

posted: 23 March 2005; 6:27am ET

When given the opportunity to choose the sex of their baby, women are just as likely to choose pink socks as blue, a new study shows. "Sex selection is a topic that's almost taboo for physicians to talk about," said Tarun Jain, a reproductive specialist at the University of Illinois, Chicago. "Yet, it's important to understand patient interest in non-medical sex selection and adequately address the ethical and social implications before the cat is out of the bag. Prior to this study, there has been no data to indicate what the demand might be." Of the 561 women who participated in the study, 229 said they would like to choose the sex of a future child. Among these 229 there was no greater for demand for boys or girls. However, the data showed that women who already had one or more children of one sex would prefer for their next child to be of the opposite sex to create gender balance within the family.

Selecting for sex

There are two methods of sex selection being used in the United States today.

One is sperm separation - the concept being that sperm with an X chromosome (for girls) weigh a little more than sperm with a Y chromosome (for boys). Because of this slight difference, the sperm can be sorted out and prepared for a simple insemination procedure.

Sex selection by sperm separation has a success rate of about 90 percent for girls and about 70 percent for boys.

The other common method is pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, or PGD, which is a form of in vitro fertilization, where embryos are prepared in a test tube before implantation in a woman's uterus. Unlike traditional in vitro fertilization, doctors take a few cells from each prepared PGD embryo to determine its sex, and they only implant embryos of the desired sexes.

This method has a success rate of nearly 100 percent, but is more expensive and much more physically intrusive for a woman compared to sperm separation, researchers say. Neither method will cause any harm to the developing baby, they say.

"In our study, patients were about equal on which procedure they would prefer,"