Genesis Fertility Clinic Blog
searching: “sex selection”
June 22, 2009
Picking gender
I get asked quite often if we can select a male or female embryo in IVF. In the interest of balancing sex in families or for cultural reasons there is a desire by many couples not just to get pregnant but to get pregnant with a child of a certain sex.
In Canada, since the Assisted Human Reproduction Act was passed by federal parliament in 2004 we cannot select sex, so the conversation about sex selection is generally a brief one!
In the USA most states do not have a similar law so sex selection can be done at many fertility clinics. It’s certainly very controversial but I cannot deny that couples can feel tremendous pressure to have children of a certain sex, for themselves or to please their relatives. In 2009 in Canada I would hope these pressures didn’t exist but they do. Honestly, I am happy that we cannot select sex as it takes the option away from us.
There is one situation in which we will select sex. If a couple carries a serious genetic disease that affects one sex and not another we will perform preimplantation genetic diagnosis or PGD and select the healthy sex. This is an expensive and complicated process (about $16,000!).
Selecting sex, for whatever reason, really isn’t that easy. Some clinics will try to wash away (typically) female sperm to leave the faster swimming male sperm for insemination. This works, at best, 80% of the time. The only real way to select gender with ~100% certainty is by the process of PGD – where a cell of an embryo is biopsied and then tested for it’s genetic complement: XX vs. XY. Then the embryo of the desired sex is put in to a woman’s uterus.
So, for most Canadian’s seeking fertility treatment they will have a child whose gender is a random act of nature: 50% female 50% male is about as good as we can guarantee.
Dr. Beth Taylor, MD, FRCSC
Reproductive Endocrinology & Infertility