Can You Choose Your Baby's Gender?

If you could pick the sex of your baby, would you?

SO YOU HAVE two boys and are desperate for a girl. And you know that sex selection (the ability to choose the sex of a future child) is now technically possible. Something that used to be left to nature is now in our hands. But do these methods open the floodgates to creating “designer babies” ?

JACK OR JILL?

Find yourself dreaming of pink frilly dresses? When you fall pregnant, you may expressly (or quietly) wish for a certain gender. But it isn’t actually up to the woman to choose the sex of the baby. All women’s eggs carry the X chromosome, but sperm carries either an X (girl-making) or a Y (boy-making) chromosome.

“Therefore it is the sperm that determines the sex of the offspring,” says Cape Town fertility specialist Dr Sascha Edelstein. The girl-making sperm is large and slow while the boy-making sperm is light and fast, meaning they are fragile and live shorter. If the Y-bearing sperm penetrates the egg, then the baby is a boy (XY). If the X-bearing sperm penetrates, then the baby is a girl (XX).

There are several techniques to improve the chance of conceiving a child of a specific gender. These include interventions such as artificial insemination or in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) and natural sex selection using home-grown methods such as diet and timing of intercourse.

THE SEX SELECTION BUSINESS