Pink or Blue, It's Up to You by David Constantine Selecting the gender of your child is now a reality print article      send to a friend

But parents are powerless no longer.  Technological advances in genetic research have enabled fertility specialists to significantly increase your chances of choosing the gender of your child.   Today, for the first time, parents may be able to select either boy or girl.

There are two techniques being used in the United States today that enable parents to increase their chances of determining the gender of their children.  One technique is called Microsort, and it is performed exclusively at the Genetics and IVF Institute in Fairfax, Virginia.  The technique involves identifying and separating sperm cells, which contain the Y-chromosome that produces males, and the X-chromosome that produces females.  X-chromosomes contain 2.8% more genetic material than Y-chromosomes.  This difference in weight can be detected by staining the sperm cells with a fluorescent dye.  The cells are then exposed to a laser light.  The amount of florescent light produced by the cells indicates the amount of genetic material in each cell. 

Microsort reports an amazing 90 percent success rate in producing females and a 73 percent in producing males. However, the technique is not without its problems.  Millions of sperm are lost during the separation, and this results in problems during insemination.

"The problem with Microsort, in my experience, has been that the specimens are so depleted that only several hundred thousand sperm are being inseminated at a time, says Dr. Daniel A. Potter, of the Huntington Reproductive Center.  "So the pregnancy rates are very low."  The pregnancy rate is 16 percent, below the natural conception rate.

Dr. Potter employs the other method: gradient selection.  "It is based on a simple physics equation: force equals mass times acceleration." 

While complicated to explain in detail, here's the skinny: Doctors can now take sperm, spin it around really fast, and are able to tell the boy sperm from the girl sperm. The sperm which contains the desired sex is then collected and artificially inseminated into the mother, and with luck the result will be the boy or girl the parents wanted.  Still, as with Microsort, this procedure is not foolproof.

"I'm pregnant with boy number four!" exclaims Arizona resident Lisa Plette(not her real name), 29-year-old mother of three boys.  Lisa is now pregnant again after undergoing the gradient procedure, and instead of getting the girl she wanted, she became pregnant with another boy.  She had undergone the Microsort procedure once, and was unable to conceive. "I didn't have a very good experience with it," she says. After undergoing one Microsort procedure, she and her husband decided to give gradient selection a try.

Lisa is more critical of the gradient selection method.  "The pregnancy rates are better, but I don't think the success rates (for sex selection) are.  I wouldn't suggest it to anyone because I know a couple of people who have done it, and they found out that it doesn't work, too."  Raising three boys, with another one on the way, Lisa is still determined to have a daughter. "I wouldn't go anywhere else but Microsort again.  I'm going to have another one, which I can't believe, but I want a daughter so badly that I will go back to Microsort over and over again until it happens."

Despite Lisa Plette's experience, gradient selection is often a more attractive option to prospective parents because it is cheaper, performed in various clinics around the country, and the rate of successful insemination is higher than Microsoft's. The reason: the gradient method is easier on the sperm.  Dr. Potter explains, "We will lose about half of the sperm when we do the procedure, but we will concentrate the sperm we do have and deposit them high up in the uterine cavity. So the pregnancy rate turns out to be as high as if the couple were having intercourse that month, that is to say about 20% per attempt."  According to Dr. Potter, gradient selection is highly effective in selecting the sex of a child.  "The success rate is about 70 to 75 percent.  It is a little higher in girls."

Hundreds of healthy babies have been born using both of these sexual selection procedures.  The chance of birth defects is no higher than natural conception.  Women with irregular menstrual cycles are able to have the procedure but usually take longer than normal to conceive because they ovulate less frequently and unpredictably.  This makes insemination more difficult.  There are many methods available to doctors that make it possible to accurately predict the time of ovulation.  The course of pregnancy should run exactly as should a normal pregnancy.  The risk of miscarriage is the same as a typical pregnancy, which is estimated at 25% of all pregnancies.  Processes are usually kept confidential.