Choosing sex of baby with certainty has become more possible during the last twenty-five or so years. This is mainly due to the steady progress made in the field of gender or sex selection, and the work done to make it possible for a couple or a prospective mother to have either a boy or a girl by preference. What should people who are thinking about baby gender selection know, then?
For starters, gender – or sex – selection attempts to predetermine the sex of a child prior to even trying to conceive. All of this work is done before the mother becomes pregnant, and there are a number of methods for doing so. Each of these methods has varying degrees of success, but odds in some cases can approach nearly 100 percent.
There are even over-the-counter, commercially-marketed kits available that help to influence the gender of the baby. These kits normally promise at least a 96 percent success rate. Their claim is that they work to make subtle changes in the body chemistry of both the mother and the father, which – in theory – helps to skew the gender selection towards the desired sex.
As far as actual medical procedures, there are several of them. One of the most popular is known as MicroSort. It seeks to separate male sperm according to differences in each of the sperm cells’ DNA, the differences of which are known to favor either a male or a female child.
Once the sperm has been categorized into those sperm cells which will lead to a male or a female, the next phase in the procedure uses either IUI (intrauterine insemination) or IVF (in vitro fertilization) to emplace fortified (or “enriched”) sperm cells into the female’s womb, for one. Or (in IVF), a ripe egg from the female is fertilized with the sperm and placed in the womb. There’s a 92 percent success factor for girls and a lower rate of 81 percent for boys.
The MicroSort success rates, though, depend upon a successful pregnancy occurring in the first place. In this regard, IUI runs about 16 percent and IVF doubles that, at about 32 percent. This is the typical rate, and is just about in line with factors for any other method of inducing pregnancy. What this means is that the odds of a sex-selected outcome after pregnancy has occurred are fairly high.
There are several successful methods for safely choosing sex of “baby,” and a couple or a woman desiring to not only have a child but also have a child of a certain gender are better than ever. As always, such a process should be undertaken with sufficient care and after a great deal of research as to benefits and drawbacks.